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Installing Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 under Wine in Ubuntu 9.04

Wanting to try out the new version of Nuance's well known speech-to-text program, but not wanting to be confined to using it just in windows, I attempted to install it under wine. This prooved harder than it needed to be. For future reference, he's how it finally shook out.
  1. First I removed wine entirely via aptitude, as there was something amiss with the install I had.
  2. Removed out the ~/.wine folder.
  3. Installed wine again via aptitude.
  4. Downloaded the winetricks script by Dan Kegel from here
  5. Set it to be executable and ran the following command:
    sudo chmod +x winetricks ./winetricks gdiplus fontfix ie6
  6. With that done, I was finally able to change to the DVD drive and run the setup.exe sucessfully.
    wine setup.exe
  7. After the installer had completed, attempts to run natspeak.exe were met with failure until I'd hunted down copies of winsta.dll and regapi.dll and moved them to the ~/.wine/c_drive/Program Files/Nuance/NaturallySpeaking10/Program folder.
  8. Lastly I had to change the mode of Wine to Windows XP useing:
    ./winetricks winxp

Making DNS 10 work with Platypus

Platypus is a program that runs inside wine and is able to pump keystrokes and commands to be executed at a terminal back onto the linux side. The result of this is that DNS 10 can relay text into speech, that Platypus grabs and interprets, and can execute commands or pass dictation into any linux-side application. Platypus is available from here, written by Henry Kroll III over at The Nerd Show.
  1. The big issue for me was getting the dependencies for compilation sorted out, as the names of the packages listed on the platypus site are no longer accurate. In order to grab the ones I needed, the following sufficed.
    sudo apt-get install libx11-xcb-dev sudo apt-get install libx11-xcb1 sudo apt-get install libxext6-dbg sudo apt-get install libxtst6-dbg sudo apt-get install wine-dev
  2. Download the source and extract it to a folder.
  3. I decided to stick with just one WINE prefix, directions for setting up a single one just for DNS10 + Platypus can be found on the platypus page. As such, I just had to run the following commands:
    make make install
  4. Once that was done, I first fired up DNS10 and waited for it to load up, then ran Platypus from the shortcut the install script had dropped on the desktop.
  5. Success! I was able to dictate into any text field I selected! New commands can be added to platypus as described on their page, but know that you need to re-run make install in order for new commands to become available.