Loading Wine Faster

I'm using Wine to run a fairly small and simple mail program that I use at school (anyone ever heard of Blitzmail?). It runs great under Wine, actually, but it takes a while to start up; the hard disk churns away for 5-6 seconds. While this is actually pretty quick, it starts almost instantaneously under Windows on the same hardware. I'd like to avoid having all the Windows users complain about how long it takes to load.

Does anyone have any tricks that I might use to speed up Wine? I've already tried 'wineserver -p' to start the wineserver and make it persistent, but it didn't make a difference. This is going to be a basic public computer, and Blitzmail is the only program I ever plan to run under Wine, so I'd be open to limiting the amount of stuff it loads, if that is possible. Would using Winetools to install it make a difference?

Running Ubuntu and the latest version of Wine on a PIII 667 with 128 MB RAM.

well it almost always takes a little while to load stuff in wine. its mostly because of unoptimised coad. the best solution would be to find an aternative pogram. (what does this thing even do?) sorry if wine isnt fast enought but thats just the way it kinda is.

benjamin,

Blitzmail is this fairly old, but still useful email client that we use at Dartmouth. While some of it is out-of-date, it has enough useful features that pretty much everyone at school uses it. I'm not too concerned if I can't speed things up, just wondering if there's something obvious that I could be missing. Thanks for the speedy response though.[/url]

There is a way to configure a few Linux email clients like Evolution to use it but it really is half-assed.

How about something like this http://netblitz2.dartmouth.edu/Bl.cgi ?

at my job, we get paid by the hour, so we go at halfass speed sometimes to avoid doing a bunch of work.

Do you run from the console? I use to find running a wined application from an icon say, that didn't pull up a terminal would always take longer to start.

I use BlitzMail with wine every once in a while, but if I keep it running too long the command keys stop working. I recommend one of the web-based blitz clients and especially WebBlitz (http://basement.dartmouth.edu/blitz) since it automatically encrypts your entire session.
The BlitzMail protocol is also incredibly insecure without an SSL Socket wrapping the conenction. I wrote a distributed program as a proof-of-concept that using 20 Sudikoff machines can a lower-case, digit-only password in 7 minutes on average.

A relatively simple way of fixing what you're talking about is to write a windows program that basically pauses and never wakes up. Start it at startup. That way the wine libraries are already in memory (which is where all the startup time is) and blitzmail should load quickly.