Introduction

Wine is the windows emulator for linux (and other unix-like systems). The project website is www.winehq.com and has an assortment of documentation, soource code, and pointers to binary packaging of wine.

Wine circa 2012 and Fedora 16 and 17

Just yum install wine, when I did this on a fairly pristine Fedora 16 system, it pulled in 101 dependent packages - everything but the kitchen sink (it even pulled in openldap). Not that there is any harm in this, but it certainly defines bloat.

And then when you start it up, it fusses about not finding mono and gecko. Mono is apparently the open source answer to .NET. Gecko is an html rendering package.

I have always just ignored these complaints (the one application I care about doesn't seem to need either), but I was curious to find out what needed to be done to fix this up.

To fix the gecko thing (there is no fedora package for wine-gecko), you do this: 

yum install cabextract
curl http://winetricks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/install-gecko.sh -o install-gecko.sh
chmod a+x install-gecko.sh
./install-gecko.sh
After doing this, wine starts without complaint. I am going to ignore the mono business for now, but will note from the little bit of research I have done that the regular linux mono packages (like mono-core) won't do the trick, you need windows mono packages, so you will need to visit winetricks again if you want to run something under wine that requires .NET

Installing TOPO! in 2012

See my notes on doing this.

Old Wine troubles

I ran this many years ago (circa wine 0.9.36) and enjoyed (for a while) being able to run the National Geographic TOPO! software. Then sometime in 2006, some bug stopped everything (TOPO! would cause wine to page fault and blow chunks). I reported the bug and was rudely mistreated by people on the Wine mailing list and gave up on the whole business for several years. This wasn't entirely bad, because during this time I wrote gtopo, a native linux viewer for the TOPO map files.

Now it is years later and under Fedora core 11 I get wine version 1.1.29 right out of the box and am in a mood to try this once again. The happy news is that TOPO! now runs flawlessly (as of November 2009). If you are interested in this (and learning some basics about setting up wine in general) take a look at my notes on setting up wine to run TOPO!.

Lately I have gotten a bug to work with Rabbit modules and Dynamic C, so I have gone through the steps to install the Dynamic C compiler.

Someday (maybe) I want to learn enough to start actually fooling with wine internals and maybe even contribute and make myself useful. This wine hacking link documents my learning process in this area.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]