Trying to do anything at all with wine

[curmudgeon]

I just installed wine for the first time (running stable x86 gentoo with kde).

So far, I am not impressed.

First of all, is there supposed to be some menu entry for wine? I found nothing, even looking through the files via qlist.

I could not get any sound at all (using the test from winecfg). The documentation suggested as a troubleshooting technique trying to send random data to /dev/dsp (that produced a quick "Device or resource busy"). Sound works perfectly otherwise on the machine.

Finally (and most important), I have not yet been able to find any application that will even install with wine. The programs will just stop (the window disappears) early in the installation without any message or log files.

Does anyone know how to get this to work?

[avx]

a) run `winecfg` -> set your prefered settings (windows version, libraries native vs built-in, etc)
b) run the installer from the shell (`wine path/to/exe`)
c) if it fails, check the output for clues
d) get yourself a copy of http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
e) use winetricks to install the most common dependencies, i.e. directx, dotnet, etc
f) try again
g) if it still fails, google for the desired app/game in combination with the error messages or look up appdb

In general, wine runs really good, I've got some games, Adobe CS2 and MS Office running without major issues. Heavily depends on what you want, though, some apps just won't run, so either google beforehand or tell us, what you want/need.
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[XQYZ]

Especially consider installing all that MS crap such as Windows Installer, dot Net/mono, DirectX. That's usually why stuff fails. "Normal Apps" usually work without much hazzle thought. For everything else there's the Wine App DB.

[curmudgeon]

[Apheus]

winetricks is in portage, you just need to unmask it (app-emulation/winetricks)

[avx]

[gerard82]

I have q4wine installed.
It's a gui for configuring and starting wine.
Works nicely with wine-1.2.1.
Gerard.
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To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has Firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

[Raptor85]

you can also associate .exe files with WINE in your WM, then simply double click the .exe to run it. Sound errors are generally due to running a daemon such as pulseaudio or jack and not having wine compiled/set up to use them.

run the exe from the shell using
WINEDEBUG="+all" wine path/to/exe/file.exe

and post up what the shell says, consider adding it to appdb since it seems this is a currently unknown application, and like said, some programs just wont run on current systems , especially ones that do nasty things like try to directly modify protected memory, or basically have their own built in video card drivers, for stuff like that you need a full emulator (stuff like that wont run on a current windows system either btw). The system requirements are fairly irrelevant in WINE, chance of a program running is more dependent on how much the developers of it actually followed how API's are supposed to be used, and not used "little tricks".

[Chewi]

I've found Wine has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years. It's certainly a hell of a lot more reliable than it was, say, 5 years ago. The sound test in winecfg has never worked very well (who knows why!?) so just try something else that makes a noise instead. I've used ALSA with Wine before and now use PulseAudio and have never had much trouble with either. Also consider trying the ~x86 version of Wine. It'll probably run more things than the current "stable" version.