[Solved(?)] WINE installation snafus

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

Moderators: MattKingUSA, khz

Post Reply
User avatar
protozone
Established Member
Posts: 181
Joined: Tue May 08, 2018 9:02 pm
Contact:

[Solved(?)] WINE installation snafus

Post by protozone »

Hmm,

Occasionally it might seem like the wine binary program is missing on some OS installs of WINE-staging.
Don't worry, depending upon how you requested to install WINE-staging, WINE is probably still there in a runnable form, one way or another.

WINE-staging in installed into the /opt/ system directory, while regular WINE usually resides within /usr/bin (I think? or is it /usr/sbin?, tricky!).
Sometimes the file browsers will default to not showing hidden files and for some reason the wine binary program might be hidden. It doesn't really matter though, because what you can do is link all of your Windows-style .EXE programs to "/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine" instead of just using the unreferenced non-pathed "wine". There are probably plenty of solutions. You can even expressly put that path into the command field for .EXE files along with the "%F" or "%f" or the actual program pathname.

For example, on my system maybe I want to run "c:\Programs\r8brain\r8brain.exe".
So what you could do is put into the launcher field

Code: Select all

/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine 'c:\Programs\r8brain\r8brain.exe'
Another way is to create a symlink (symbolic link) of "/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine", rename it to "wine" and put it into "/usr/sbin" and/or "usr/bin".
On Thunar, this is possible. I believe since it's a soft link and not an actual file, it can coexist with the "real" wine if it's hidden in there or if it gets installed later.

The WINE-staging or any other type of wine that gets installed into /opt/ is kind of it's own thing almost separate from wine ("stable", plain).
Items put into the "bin" or "sbin" folders of any type will be recognized "by name" and won't need their full pathnames spelled out usually, I think.

But the folders have specific purposes, so be careful.
Windows-style .MSI files are supposed to be run using

Code: Select all

wine start 'c:\PathTo\Installer.msi'
type of way. Notice the word "start".

It's also important to use the single quotes ( ' ) and ( ' ) around the path and name of the actual .EXE program files.
Since .EXE's and .MSI's aren't Linux binaries, they might not show up in a file browser until you select "ALL FILES" from the window-embedded drop-down menu, usually near the bottom right of the file browser dialog window. This is a detail that sometimes gets overlooked.

I suppose to overcome that, you could change the permission of all EXE's systemwide to a+x * -R, but that's risky. But I know of a guy that did that once on Ubuntu. But as long as you know to just select ALL FILES as well as right-click for "show hidden files" you'll be OK. It's similar within Windows... in any "explorer" dialog window for save and/or open, you can type "*.*" (without quotes) and enter, and the list will start showing everything, not just the file format being opened or saved.

By the way, Sometimes you can open .EXE's and/or even a few .MSI's with an archive program without having to run the program and risking execution issues.
If you get into the habit of at least trying this technique, you might acclimate to knowing which types of .EXEs are just archives and which folders inside of them to extract and which to ignore. This can help make installing software a little less frustrating since running a program lets it do almost whatever it wants to your system unsupervised. And luckily a lot of freeware is distributed in .ZIP and 7ZIP format so you can skip the fuss. NotePad++ is thankfully like that and offered in a portable no-mess download and it runs in WINE. I use it instead of WINE's equivalent of Notepad.exe

I hope this helps anybody who might have been at a temporary standstill with using WINE in Linux to get Linux Audio accomplished.

I almost forgot, if WINE is totally missing, and WINE-staging is missing too, follow the instructions at http://winehq.org for proper instructions on how to download and install. Use their website search field to search for "mono" and then for "gecko" to get the full WINE installs of the mono and gecko .MSI programs which are needed for some extra compatibility and functionality. They aren't totally needed and are slightly a pain to install, but a few programs will prematurely exit if their functionality is missing.

Mono is the WINE equivalent of "dot NET framework" (.NET) If Mono is installed, you won't need to install any type of .NET stuff most likely. Gecko provides some http/html/web/internet/email type of functionality which might be necessary for some payware programs or programs where the author's site is automatically emailed during a crash or a program that needs to connect to the web for whatever.
User avatar
protozone
Established Member
Posts: 181
Joined: Tue May 08, 2018 9:02 pm
Contact:

Re: [Solved(?)] WINE installation snafus

Post by protozone »

Hmm,

Occasionally it might seem like the wine binary program is missing on some OS installs of WINE-staging.
Don't worry, depending upon how you requested to install WINE-staging, WINE is probably still there in a runnable form, one way or another.

First, you will probably want to run /opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg
This will give you the chance to set up WINE-staging for use and to see which version is running and to get the /home/username/.wine/ directory automatically created and containing the fake C:\ drive. It's the WINE Configuration (winecfg).

If you run it another way, you might be running the plain WINE one instead of the WINE-staging one, or you might be running some other WINE's configuration tool, so check and use the directory path specifically. Please factcheck me on that, as I make mistakes too.

Ubuntu Studio users will note that WINE-staging doesn't automatically create an Ubuntu system Application menu entry. But you can manually create your own launcher entries for "/opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg" and "/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine".

Similarly, mono and gecko go into specific folders. More on that can be found at http://winehq.org

WINE-staging in installed into the /opt/ system directory, while regular WINE usually resides within /usr/bin (I think? or is it /usr/sbin?, tricky!).
Sometimes the file browsers will default to not showing hidden files and for some reason the wine binary program might be hidden. It doesn't really matter though, because what you can do is link all of your Windows-style .EXE programs to "/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine" instead of just using the unreferenced non-pathed "wine". There are probably plenty of solutions. You can even expressly put that path into the command field for .EXE files along with the "%F" or "%f" or the actual program pathname.

For example, on my system maybe I want to run "c:\Programs\r8brain\r8brain.exe".
So what you could do is put into the launcher field

Code: Select all

/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine 'c:\Programs\r8brain\r8brain.exe'
Another way is to create a symlink (symbolic link) of "/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine", rename it to "wine" and put it into "/usr/sbin" and/or "usr/bin".
On Thunar, this is possible. I believe since it's a soft link and not an actual file, it can coexist with the "real" wine if it's hidden in there or if it gets installed later.

The WINE-staging or any other type of wine that gets installed into /opt/ is kind of it's own thing almost separate from wine ("stable", plain).
Items put into the "bin" or "sbin" folders of any type will be recognized "by name" and won't need their full pathnames spelled out usually, I think.

But the folders have specific purposes, so be careful.
Windows-style .MSI files are supposed to be run using

Code: Select all

wine start 'c:\PathTo\Installer.msi'
type of way. Notice the word "start".

It's also important to use the single quotes ( ' ) and ( ' ) around the path and name of the actual .EXE program files.

Since .EXE's and .MSI's aren't Linux binaries, they might not show up in a file browser until you select "ALL FILES" from the window-embedded drop-down menu, usually near the bottom right of the file browser dialog window. This is a detail that sometimes gets overlooked.

I suppose to overcome that, you could change the permission of all EXE's systemwide to a+x * -R, but that's risky. But I know of a guy that did that once on Ubuntu. But as long as you know to just select ALL FILES as well as right-click for "show hidden files" you'll be OK. It's similar within Windows... in any "explorer" dialog window for save and/or open, you can type "*.*" (without quotes) and enter, and the list will start showing everything, not just the file format being opened or saved.

By the way, Sometimes you can open .EXE's and/or even a few .MSI's with an archive program without having to run the program and risking execution issues.

If you get into the habit of at least trying this technique, you might acclimate to knowing which types of .EXEs are just archives and which folders inside of them to extract and which to ignore. This can help make installing software a little less frustrating since running a program lets it do almost whatever it wants to your system unsupervised. And luckily a lot of freeware is distributed in .ZIP and 7ZIP format so you can skip the fuss. NotePad++ is thankfully like that and offered in a portable no-mess download and it runs in WINE. I use it instead of WINE's equivalent of Notepad.exe
Just be sure to set the preferences carefully so you don't corrupt your .INI or .conf files. I think choosing FF is tUTF-8 without BOM is usually the safest cross-platform comatible format unless it's really old and needs to be just ASCII text.

But the advantage is that NotePad++.exe in XML form shows all of the punctuation and formatting colorcoded if you choose a global "style" for that. Also, you can use it to EDIT>LINE OPERATIONS>SORT LINES LEXICOGRAPHICALLY. This just sorts lines alphanumerically (alphabetically, including numbers and punctuation). This is helpful if you want to sort the lines within you mime types configuration files. That way, all the image parts are together, all the video parts are together, all the audio parts are together at the top, etc. It makes customizing easier. Of course I'm sure there are normal native linux programmer text editors to accomplish this instead, such as "gedit", but you might want WINE to have it's own good text editor associated (or not) too.

If so inclined, you might have some success setting WINE associations internally with NirSoft's FileTypesMan.exe , freeware from NirSoft.net
I have used it in the past, although lately I tend to disable winemenubuilder.exe from within /opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg (WINE Configuration tool).

I hope this helps anybody who might have been at a temporary standstill with using WINE in Linux to get Linux Audio accomplished.

I almost forgot, if WINE is totally missing, and WINE-staging is missing too, follow the instructions at http://winehq.org for proper instructions on how to download and install. Use their website search field to search for "mono" and then for "gecko" to get the full WINE installs of the mono and gecko .MSI programs which are needed for some extra compatibility and functionality. They aren't totally needed and are slightly a pain to install, but a few programs will prematurely exit if their functionality is missing.

Mono is the WINE equivalent of "dot NET framework" (.NET) If Mono is installed, you won't need to install any type of .NET stuff most likely. Gecko provides some http/html/web/internet/email type of functionality which might be necessary for some payware programs or programs where the author's site is automatically emailed during a crash or a program that needs to connect to the web for whatever.
Post Reply