Pando Media Booster Forum

Is there a way to access the PMB control panel applet through crossover? I want to limit the speed it up/downloads stuff.

An interesting question. LOTRO uses PMB to download the game. While it is running and downloading, I assume it is accessible in the normal PMB manner. (Whatever that is, as I haven't tried it -- yet.)
According to Pando's FAQ, http://www.pandonetworks.com/pando-media-booster-support-faq

In Windows XP, go to Control Panel and choose the Pando Media
Booster icon to open the Options dialog box.

In Windows 7 or Vista, go to Control Panel, then select “Network
and Internet Connections” to find the icon.

However launching PMB from its binary -- it shows it (pmb.exe) running in the "task manager" "processes" list, but I can't get it to open a window and "show itself." And I have no idea what the CO equivalent of the "Windows control Panel" happens to be.

What I also don't know is -- what that .exe really is. Even though the CrossTie for LOTRO downloads and installs PMB, it is actually downloaded a second time and installed by the Turbine LOTRO installer, which then runs it and calls PMB.

If I run the PMB crossTie installer on the overview tab and create a new bottle (Pando) it launches a window called "Wine System Tray." when you click on the icon in that window, it launches the "Task Manager" window, and shows PMB.EXE running in the Processes... but nothing else.
It does NOT create an entry in the programs menu.

Clearing and rebuilding the Programs menu does not reveal it either.
Sorry I can't be more help on this one. Maybe whoever actually created this page for PMB in Codeweavers can help.

... this thing, is downright evil in winetech ; the best thing to
happen to DDO just recently, was the full download archive/installer
becoming available for that title, so one doesn't have to use PMB
there anymore ... and the crowd cheered...

... in basic terms, PMB is a bit-torrent client that tends to run
like a background daemon process. As noted here, the methods that
windows users have to control it's behavior, don't become available
to us in winetech (possibly because it's looking to futz with a 'real'
win32 tcpip stack, and winetech just piggybacks on the host stack)...

.. here, PMB has the obnoxious honor award for being the only win32
program capable of crashing my wifi bridge/router ; it'd be a pretty
sure bet that if I shelled into openwrt running on the router, I'd
find the reason it's crashing is due to PMB gobbling up ports/sockets..

..I surely suspect, it's running in 'unlimited' mode, and further, I
would consider that if someone is using this sort of thing to deliver
games and 'share the bandwidth' between as many hosts/peers as possible,
a certain logic suggests, used as an installer facility, you would by
default start it in unlimited mode ..

..oh, other parts of the client allow for graphics, video, flash and
other games presentation features, and this is all pretty much on top
of IE and friends.. ; there are bugs hoisted in winehq bugzilla wrt PMB...

.

Artist Formally Known as Dot wrote:

... this thing, is downright evil in winetech ; the best thing to
happen to DDO just recently, was the full download archive/installer

becoming available for that title, so one doesn't have to use PMB
there anymore ... and the crowd cheered...

I'm not certain what you mean by "archive/installer."

Sigh... I haven't really been paying attention to DDO lately (effectively since Turbine started LOTRO and I got invited into the pre-beta.)

My "support" has been simply verifying that the bottle that I have runs or does not run.

For what it's worth, I assume that the DDO installer now works the same as the LOTRO installer.
Both have PMB imbedded in them -- what I mentioned about the CrossTie file for LOTRO doing a "double install" of PMB.

First the CrossTie installs PMB, and then the Turbine installer installs PMB again.

The Turbine Installer is a 3-part- "installer." It first installs whatever "piece" it has which is necessary to download and configure PMB to download the LOTRO game binaries. It then "passes off" to PMB, which does the download. When PMB completes, it goes back to the Turbine installer, which "finishes" whatever it needs to finish, then invokes the Turbine Launcher, which "still fails" in WINE 4.1. Then we kill the Turbine installer/invoker off and switch to PyLotRO, which becomes the game client loader.

There is a thread on the WINE appdb LOTRO site about how someone has managed to get the Turbine Launcher to run with a version called GIT. (lol, go read the thread) so I have no idea which build of WINE they are talking about "latest" being quite relative.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=23486

Guess I'll have to find the time to do a full install of DDO and see what happens. (The LOTRO install takes about 6 hours to download and then another 4 hours to do the install after the game distribution is downloaded.) Right now, I have the interesting "bug" filed with CodeWeavers -- the PMB download only seems to get as far as about 50%, and then fails, requiring that it be restarted. Since it is a Torrent type downloader, I assume that the restart and completion of the download happens with "no problems." (This failure appears to be a file handle issue, but I have no idea if it is a OSX Lion issue or one of WINE.)

However, I can run LOTRO and DDO bottles created before CO11, with zero problem 6-8 hours at a strech. But bottles created with CO11 and this "download-interuptus" issue, seem to "hang" on a regular basis, after only 10 to 90 minutes of game time.

Artist Formally Known as Dot wrote:

..I surely suspect, it's running in 'unlimited' mode, and further, I

would consider that if someone is using this sort of thing to
deliver
games and 'share the bandwidth' between as many hosts/peers as
possible,
a certain logic suggests, used as an installer facility, you would
by
default start it in unlimited mode ..

I don't believe that it is running unlimited. It might start that way, but it quickly throttles itself back.

I have a 6meg DSL line and I've never seen my downloads above about 50%. I haven't really looked but the download does not impact my own game playing or other activities while running. I"m on the East Coast, with my ISP (Cavtel) based in VA, and very rarely have any noticeable bandwidth issues. When I do, "everything" stops! I monitor things periodically via DSLreports.com.

The best news however, is that PMB only runs during the download process. Once you finish the download and quit and restart CO, it is no longer running, and does not restart.

William H. Magill wrote:

I don't believe that it is running unlimited. It might start that
way, but it quickly throttles itself back.

I have a 6meg DSL line and I've never seen my downloads above about
50%. I haven't really looked but the download does not impact my own
game playing or other activities while running. I"m on the East
Coast, with my ISP (Cavtel) based in VA, and very rarely have any
noticeable bandwidth issues. When I do, "everything" stops! I
monitor things periodically via DSLreports.com.

The best news however, is that PMB only runs during the download
process. Once you finish the download and quit and restart CO, it is
no longer running, and does not restart.

...I had a windows user check this online last night ; it does start
'unlimited'... and stays that way. The throttling effect we see, is
baiscally PMB choking on itself - the crosstie for it does specify a
switch of 'GC_DONT_GC' (do not collect garbage) and that stops it from
crashing inside the first few minutes, but it will, eventually, tear
itself down to a lump of code in memory doing nothing, and you'll need
to kill it off and restart things...

..let me be clear here - this has nothing to do with bandwidth -- PMB
will crash my wifi bridge/router with only around 500kbps of bandwidth
being used by PMB ; the average speed I get through the same hardware
downloading a steamapp, is something in the order of 1.2 ~ 1.5Mbps and
it will never crash ... indeed, the hardware -never- crashes usually,
just when PMB is running -- as I intimate to above, I'll just bet it's
using up all the back-channel ports/sockets, or, I suppose it's entirely
possible it's throwing a malformed packet at the router which gags it...

..wrt DDO, what I mean is the full install archive is now downloadable,
so there's no need to do the PMB install process anymore ; you can just
install the base game and it patches itself thereafter...

...fortunately, DDO is/was the only app I had anything to do with that
used PMB, and I simply won't have anything to do with PMB ever again..

.