compiling windows screensavers on linux

an customer would like to provide to his website visitors an windows screensaver as download. So far so god, but: The screensavers should be generated on the fly with some meta date which needs to be displayed within the screensaver.

I've found some windows tools which can create screensaver files through an UI (http://www.instantstorm.com/download/) but they provide no documented cli interface if neither. The cli interface could be useful when using DOSBox on ubuntu to compile an screensaver file.

The question is how this could be accompli开发者_如何学Goshed?

Best, Stanislav

If it's a recent windows application you probably need to use wine instead of dosbox, which doesn't really need X if it's a cli app.

Yes you can compile windows binaries on Linux, but unless you provide more information, it is impossible to provide more details.

You should be able to use mingw32 to cross compile executables for windows, though you will need to make your sources acceptable to GCC in order to do this.

However, have you considered the possibility of patching the binary rather than compiling it? Perhaps things have changed since I last tried it under XP, but I believe strings included in the program or in a resource come through either unchanged or in an accessible encoding which you could easily patch, provided that you kept the length in memory the same (for something null-terminated, you can always make it shorter by placing a null earlier). Also you might be able to append data to the end of the executable and read that at runtime.

However, if your binary is expected to be signed in some manner, you'd have to do the signing after the modification.