Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package. It is extensively used in biomedical research, along with Endnote (sold by the same company), mainly because the main OS in these labs is Windows from Microsoft. I used it at the university and still have some reference databases in its format (with file extension .rmd).

This evening, I had to go back into one of those proprietary, closed databases I still had (most of my references were later re-entered in a BibTeX file). I could have borrowed my wife’s computer running Windows or tried some Open Source software that can open .rmd files. But it would have been too easy. So I tried it with Wine, a program that allows Microsoft Windows applications to run under Linux. In Wine AppDB, it is written people had tried version 9 and 11. In the old time, I bought a student license for version 10.

I’m running Fedora 14 and Wine 1.3.24. The installation didn’t cause any problem. Launching the application neither. I can easily open existing database and see the reference summary (bottom part of the screen, see screenshot below). But I can’t properly see the reference details (upper part of the screen). In fact, all the details are there but they are not properly rendered. If you click in one of these fields, you’ll see the text from these fields. But once you’ll click elsewhere, the previously clicked field will disappear. The search function in the database is working. The export of a bibliography list from a selection of references in the application works. I was not able to test the integration with MS-Word. Note that it cannot search in PubMed (but it’s probably due to the fact the update for PubMed was not installed).

I also submitted an entry in the Wine AppDB ; it is currently reviewed.

• Computers
• Lab life