PokerTracker 3 HUD with Wine

PokerTracker 3 can be installed under wine without any problems and the program itself works perfectly. The HUD however is close to useless, as it is shown as a solid grey box covering the poker clients window, preventing any interaction with the poker client. See the WineHQ bug report for more details and current status: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15118

If you use Compiz Fusion, you can use the plugin "Ghost" to make the HUD somewhat usable.

What can be achieved?

Before you get all exited and start to install the Ghost plugin, make sure you read this first. The Ghost plugin can only do the following for you:

• Provide transparency to the PT3 HUD windows. But the transparency is not only applied to the part of the hud that does not contain information (like it would be in windows), the whole HUD window will become transparent. So, its a tradeoff between washed out colors of the poker client vs hard-to-read HUD stats. Another annoying thing is that the HUD window is actually bigger than the poker client, so you will have dark edges around the poker client (see the attached screenshot). Very annoying if you want to have several tables open right next to each other.
• As long as the HUD window is in "Ghost mode", all klicks and keyboard events are passed through. This means you can not interact with the HUD in any way (no mouseovers, no popups, etc). You can enable/disable the ghost plugin by hotkey, so you can temporarily turn it off and interact with the HUD to move stats, open hand history, open note editor, etc.
• PT3 Popup windows are still useless, they are rendered as a solid grey box.

If you still think you want to give it a try, here you go...

How to enable Ghost plugin for PokerTracker 3 HUD

• Install the Ghost plugin for compiz as explained here
• (Re-)start the Compiz settings manager ccsm. Search for the ghost plugin and view its settings.
• Activate the plugin.
• Check "Ghost Active Window".
• Choose a "Toggle Ghost" hotkey. I use "Win+<", but anything will do.
• In "Window Types" enter "title=PokerTracker3TableCover".
• Set Opacity to 30, Saturation/Brightness to 100. Make sure you remove all HUD transparency from PT3 settings, otherwise readability of HUD stats will be even worse.

You can now start playing. Whenever you open a new table, the PT3 HUD will start as a grey box. Hit the "Toggle Ghost" hotkey to make it transparent and click-through. Whenever you need to interact with the HUD, just hit the "Toggle Ghost" key again.

Screenshot of Compiz settings:

Screenshot of HUD: