Using Windows DLL from Linux

Any solution is going to need a TCP/IP-based "remoting" layer between the DLL which is running in a "windows-like" environment, and your linux app.

You'll need to write a simple PC app to expose the DLL functions, either using a homebrew protocol, or maybe XML-RPC, SOAP or JSON protocols. The RemObjects SDK might help you - but could be overkill.

I'd stick with a 'real' or virtualized PC. If you use Wine, the DLL developers are unlikely to offer any support.

MONO is also unlikely to be any help, because your DLL is probably NOT a .NET assembly.

I wrote a small Python module for calling into Windows DLLs from Python on Linux. It is based on IPC between a regular Linux/Unix Python process and a Wine-based Python process. Because I have needed it in too many different use-cases / scenarios myself, I designed it as a "generic" ctypes module drop-in replacement, which does most of the required plumbing automatically in the background.

Example: Assume you're in Python on Linux, you have Wine installed, and you want to call into msvcrt.dll (the Microsoft C runtime library). You can do the following:

from zugbruecke import ctypes
dll_pow = ctypes.cdll.msvcrt.pow
dll_pow.argtypes = (ctypes.c_double, ctypes.c_double)
dll_pow.restype = ctypes.c_double
print('You should expect "1024.0" to show up here: "%.1f".' % dll_pow(2.0, 10.0))

Source code (LGPL), PyPI package & documentation.

It's still a bit rough around the edges (i.e. alpha and insecure), but it does handle most types of parameters (including pointers).