Wine Question

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 00:58, Wade Smart wrote:
> 04052006 1738 GMT-6
>
> Some time ago I installed Wine from Sidenet. It installed IE, which
> was exactly what
> I needed at the time. Now I have a few apps I want to run like
> SWiSHmax. When I installed SWiSHmax it ran right after start up but
> then I cant get the app to work.

That's still very common with wine - it's alpha software and many 
things don't work yet. Nothing to get alarmed about, often you can 
get the stuff to work anyway.

> So I installed it again. And the same thing.

That's normal in Linux. When you reinstall or reboot you normally get 
the same problem again.

> Im wondering if its this specific install of Wine.

Could be - wine is very dynamic, the developers tend to fix 10 things 
and break 3 every month

> What if I installed a second wine. Would that cause problems?

It won't cause problems if you do it right, but it also won't fix your 
problem. What you have is that some feature in Win32 is not 
implemented yet in wine and your app breaks or does funny stuff. 
Example - a common recurring fault is that the Outlook splash screen 
doesn't go away. It'll be fixed one day....

To get your app to work, visit wine's site and check the app database 
if someone has documented what it needs to run properly. Otherwise 
you need to get in there and get your hands dirty. Download the docs 
from www.winehq.org and read 'em - especially the bit about opening 
and logging channels. It's awfully hard to help you through this if 
you are not yet comfortable with the guts of wine. Briefly, start by 
doing this:

In a terminal, "export WINE_DEBUG=+loaddll" then run your app - "wine 
swishmax.exe" or whatever. Wine will print each dll it loads to the 
console and eventually fail with an error message. You need to find 
which dll is not doing what it needs to, so the general idea is you 
copy the real Windows dlls used one by one from a Windows partition 
to your ~/.wine, run winecfg and tell wine to run that dll 'native' 
for that app. Then try again. If you are lucky one of them causes a 
large change and that is a clue to what to do next.

If you feel you are up for the challenge, mail me back and we'll take 
it from there. It's not easy but it is fun in a perverse sort of 
way... :-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five