DJS Consulting Tech Blog » Wine

Webshots – Wine Strikes Again!

Daniel — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:00:42 +0000

When I ran Windows as my desktop, I had a program called WebShots that I used to set my desktop wallpaper, and cycle it. They have Windows and Mac versions, but no Linux version yet. They still send me e-mails each week, showing the daily picture selections for each day in the past week. I decided to download the Windows version, and install in under wine to see if it would work. I moved “websamp.exe” to /home/summersd/.wine/fake_windows, then ran “wine C:\\websamp.exe” to install the program. “wine “C:\\Program Files\\Webshots\\Launcher.exe” ” then started the desktop control. I used that to disable the tray icon (wine has one, but you can’t see it), and I disabled almost every other “auto update” feature.

I had downloaded a “.wbz” file (which is what is imported into WebShots), and I finally figured out how to import it. Running the launcher program, and following it with the name of the .wbz file, imports it. I may figure out a way to automate that, but for now, I know how to do it.

(Note: This is the end of the “My Linux Adventure” series of posts. After this, I ended up going back to Windows XP, just because it worked and I didn’t have hobbyist time. As of May 2007, I’m running Ubuntu 7.04 on one computer, and Windows Vista on my laptop, which is currently out of commission.)

foobar2000 with Wine

Daniel — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:00:22 +0000

foobar2000 is about the best, most organized audio player I’ve found. However, it is a Windows application, and according to what I’ve read, very reliant on Microsoft C++ extensions. I decided to give it a shot under wine, and it works great! There is a repaint problem – sometimes the playlist doesn’t refresh as it should. But, it’s pretty much a start-and-minimize sort of application, so that’s acceptable.

Success with Wine & Diagnostics

Daniel — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 06:00:57 +0000

At work, we use an editor called Visual SlickEdit (VSlick). It’s got a lot of features, and supports color-coding for many different languages. I decided that I’d give wine another shot, as we only have the Windows version of this program. I installed wine and winesetuptk, used winesetuptk to configure the installation, then ran the installation program. Everything installed, and the program ran up to a point, when it started complaining about a missing DLL. I booted to WXP, found the DLL, copied it to the FAT32 drive, rebooted to Linux, and copied the DLL into the “fake windows” system directory. Soon, it was working great! I can’t believe it – success with wine!

I also have made little headway towards getting Apache and MySQL to working. I changed the process that Apache uses to run as “summersd”, and I was able to see pages (although any pages that relied on a database didn’t work). I still haven’t figured this one out yet…

I’m still getting kernel panics from time to time, and it seems to be whenever I access networking. A suggestion from one of the folks on the WBEL users list was to download the Ultimate Boot CD, filled with diagnostic programs. I downloaded it, burned it, and ran some memory checks. Those checked out, so I’m going to run a “CPU Burn-In” program to see if it can detect errors from the CPU. It runs for up to 7 days, but I think I’ll just run it overnight – folding@home didn’t take nearly that long to crash it before.

Non-alcoholic Wine Experiments

Daniel — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 07:00:35 +0000

Wine is not getting me drunk. I installed it, downloaded and installed WineSetupTK to assist with configuration. I then ran the setup program (through wine) for Thomas the Tank Engine: The Great Festival Adventure. Once that completed, I tried to run the program (by entering [wine "C:\Program Files\Hasbro Interactive\The Great Festival Adventure\thomas.exe"]) and got a message box saying “CD check path not found.” I searched the web for this message, and didn’t find anything – it may be a message from the game, and not wine. I’ll do some digging later.

You may remember the problems I had with the Folding@Home client. So, I decided to try to run the Windows version through wine. I downloaded it, and ran it through wine. It took about 2 minutes to lock my machine up. I’m not being too hard on wine for this stuff – an emulator isn’t going to be 100%. I am concerned that I don’t seem to be able to run any sort of Folding@Home client, and since it’s not open-source, I can’t try compiling on this computer.

I uninstalled the OpenOffice.org suite from the /root directory, and installed it in /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.2 (which was where it suggested). Now, it works for normal users. I still haven’t been able to resolve my printing problems, but I sent a question today to the WBEL users list – they came through quickly for helping me resolve my mail importing issues.

Downloading Wine

Daniel — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 07:00:42 +0000

Today I didn’t do a whole lot – I deleted the dupes out of my inbox subfolders, and I downloaded wine. I’ll install it tomorrow.