Sunday, August 05, 2007

Extracting icon from win32 app (or apps) using WINE on Linux

Native Linux apps are of course preferable to running Win32 ones under compatibility libs like WINE.
But when you install one such app on Linux, one of the problems of those apps is what icon to put to the launcher object(s) in our desktop or Gnome panel.

(It's not that I use a lot but the PMView PRO trial and WORDVIEW.EXE PPVIEWER.EXEs from MSFT come to mind (as my winders now runs under Win4Lin)...

I found THIS FREEBIE from MSFT (actually a coding sample from MSDN).
http://download.microsoft.com/download/win95/utility/1.0/w9xxp/en-us/4493.exe

Just extract it with unzip, find icontool.exe, and then run it with wine ./icontool.exe
There's an option in the app that allows to "Extract Icon from EXE/DLL", navigate to your Win32 installed app (usually in your $home/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Application_Name_here), find the EXE, and then use the option "EXPORT AS BMP" to save a BMP you can then use (after conversion to PNG) as icon for your win32 app under Linux. (Save it under /usr/share/pixmaps).

There you have. And if this helped you a lot, remember I always gladly accept $5 Amazon.com gift certificates delivered to my e-mail f c a s s i a @ g m a i l . c o m
:-D

Have a nice day!

FC