A Man and his Penguin

I have had two messages telling me that people read my blog. Thanks! I think a number of other people are occasional readers.

I’d just like to talk about WINE, if that’s alright. For those of you who don’t know, WINE is a program for Linux that allows you to run some Windows programs. It’s an open-source implementation of the Windows libraries, and because of the way it’s built, you can get the genuine Windows libraries and put them onto your computer and make the programs run better.

Due to certain things, I’d never read the HOWTO about substituting Windows libraries for the WINE ones, so I’d never had much success. I could run a simple CD-cover-designing program that came with my computer, a motocros game, Firefox for Windows, and the Flash 8 plugin for Firefox.

(LEFT: hi-5.com.au on Linux Firefox, RIGHT: The same site on Windows Firefox on WINE)

So then I found that WINE creates a kind of Windowsy file structure inside the Linux user’s home directory (/home/chris/.wine), and you can put the Windows DLLs there. (/home/chris/.wine/drive_c/Windows/System/)

Now I can run the Windows beta of Songbird on Linux! It’s a bit slow, and sometimes the playback is a bit jaggy, but otherwise it’s okay. It probably works better than the native Linux version at the moment :-)   Although my MP3-player’s software runs, it can’t find the player. I’ve almost had Microsoft Movie Maker running.

My tip is: When you launch a program through WINE in the terminal, if it doesn’t work, see if it mentions any missing DLL files in the terminal output. If it does, find the DLL in your Windows partition and copy it over to WINE’s directories.

Finally. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’m a fan of the podcast they do over at www.ubuntuos.com. Please support them, they’ve just put out a new one. Oh, and I bought a cheap  Windows game called Ambulance Driver; it’s heaps of fun. Doesn’t work on WINE though, it tries to run but nothing appears on the screen. I bet Cedega would work with it… but that’s another blog post…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 5:08 am and is filed under Open-source application software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.