for the Linux experts, WINE problem

[Husar]

Well, I tried to install some older games in Linux(Ubuntu 9.10) today (Locomotion and Act of War) and both installers give me an error code "0x8002000E" at startup and then when i get to chosing an installation directory, i can only select C:\windows, changing it has no effect, trying to go on always says it's an unacceptable directory.
Couldn't find anything using google, so does anyone have an idea?

Oh and no suggestion to use Windows please, I got a Windows PC next to me but I am trying to get this to work in Ubuntu, ok...

[Xiahou]

Have you run 'winecfg' yet? Part of what that program does is create a directory structure inside of a .wine folder that you'll find in your home directory.

Also, use Windows.

[Husar]

Yes, I have, created a drive in my folder, but whenever I select it in the installer and click OK, it says C\Windows again.

[caravel]

Did you download the latest wine or did you install the one from the repos?

Did you install i386 or amd64 distro?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Are you on Wine 1.1.41? There is a regression that prevents installers from running properly: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22066
According to a bug report there should be a new version (1.1.42) out in “two weeks”:

It's a development release, things are often broken. 1.1.42 should be out in
two weeks, so either use 1.1.40, patch 1.1.41 manually, or wait for 1.1.42
(assuming this patch makes it in).

Patch:

Patch sent: http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine...ch/086074.html

Which is reported to fix the issue; if you can't wait, can't downgrade but are up to compiling from git...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Did you download the latest wine or did you install the one from the repos?

Did you install i386 or amd64 distro?

Should not be relevant as Wine is i386 exclusively and pulls in ia32libs and so on.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Also, use Windows ReactOS.

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

Be pretty interesting to see how that works out if and when it matures a bit.

[Tellos Athenaios]

FWIW: If you hadn't already and you want to have the most current wine; you can add the Wine deb repository to your APT sources (lists). If you have a recent Ubuntu (like 9.10 or newer) it is a simple:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Which will import the archive PGP key and source list. Then you can update your software sources (sudo aptitude update) and your system should know about the latest wine versions available as debian packages.

[Husar]

Thanks Tellos Athenaios, I already added the upgrade path but not via console, did it in the software repositories window, that's how I got 1.1.41 in the first place.
Wouldn't know how to downgrade or apply that fix, just had a look at Linux for about a week and it wasn't a very deep look either, google provided a bit of help and fortunately it's very automatic by now, the console gives me nightmares, I'd need a course to learn how it works ( I know, you type things into it, but I mean how the commands work, yesterday I learned "cd home" doesn't work, has to be "cd /home", my luck that it was "cd" at all ). Sudo, judo, budo, ppa, etc. doesn't tell me anything(yet).

[Tellos Athenaios]

If you need to know how a command works there is usually a help screen for it; or better yet a manual or info page. You can type man <man_page> to access a manual page; and info <info_page> to access an info page (for some programs there is a difference between the two, apparently). Typically <man_page> or <info_page> is the same name as the program you want to read up on; e.g.

man sudo

.

For a start try reading

man builtins

; which details the standard commands the bash shell recognizes without additional programs.
EDIT: If you are really interested a Bash scripting guide such as this: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ should prove useful.

PPA is quite specific to Ubuntu and means Personal Package Archive. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have this project site called Launchpad (which is similar to SourceForge) and PPA's are essentially the archives of projects hosted on Launchpad. The program add-apt-repository knows how to obtain PGP keys from the Launchpad server and how to resolve the name of a PPA archive to something that can be used by the other software package management tools on the system.

And sudo is a program which is used to temporarily grant you administrative powers which is required if you want to fiddle with system software and system wide configuration settings.

[caravel]

...Linux(Ubuntu 9.10)...

Seriously... please try a real distro - in fact anything but that thing.

[Husar]

Seriously... please try a real distro - in fact anything but that thing.

You mean one that only consists of a DOS-like console environment?

The university offers a course to prepare to get the LPIC-1 certificate, I'm planning to do that.

[caravel]

You mean one that only consists of a DOS-like console environment?

Not what I meant, but there are some far better distros than Ubuntu around. e.g. Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, etc, to name but a few. You will probably have to discover what's 'wrong' with Ubuntu yourself though - but IMHO you're better off with Debian Squeeze (testing) every time. The upcoming Ubuntu release is based on Squeeze anyway - where previous releases, including the current, were based on Sid (unstable).

Ubuntu is, in a nutshell, Debian unstable with a brown theme (purple nowadays!), easy access to proprietary software and plenty of dodgy marketing thrown in. Anything you can do with Ubuntu can be done with Debian, the difference being that with Debian it will take a bit more effort on your part, but the results will be solid, lasting and you will learn something in the process.

Also the terminal is a fact of life with Linux and it won't be going away - once you get into it you won't look back, first you have to realise why it's necessary. The only reason it's thought of as "DOS-like" is because people from a mainly windows background associate a command line with DOS - which is 'old'.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Ubuntu *is* a real distro. It's not a distro aimed at the same audience as Fedora is, or Debian is, or Arch/Gentoo are.

I'd define the intended audiences as follows:

1. Ubuntu: for those who want to run a Debian installation but do not wish to spend the time administrating it. Essentially what Windows XP was to the NT range of Microsoft's OS. It is, understandably, similarly popular. It has very much the same approach to the technical side of things as Debian, except it wants to run a considerably more recent crop of software than Debian does (generally speaking it is halfway between Debian sid [unstable] and Debian testing on release). Also it does not mind proprietary software (including drivers) as much; as long as it is freely redistributable. Users that run pre-release versions of the distribution run essentially the Fedora equivalent of a Debian based system. Users that run LTS (long-term-support, is extra stable) releases are essentially Windows XP users who want a Linux.
2. For those who want & expect to run (much) the latest software found in Linux land: Fedora. These people must have some of the skills, persuasion & perseverance to run Debian but in addition are supposed to file bugs on their software, too.
3. For those who want & expect to control their software through manual configuration after installation: Debian. There is a strong emphasis on “it just works”, if not before configuration to make it work the way you want to. In addition you had better drop your proprietary ways if you want an easy time on Debian. You are expected to read man pages, /usr/share/docs/ and the various other documentation of the packages you seek to tame. It's not so hard, just time consuming. Essentially this is a system administrator's distribution with its emphasis on stability, wide range of software: installing Debian is best done once, and the resulting OS imaged and copied to other machines.
4. For those who like & expect to control their software from building it to configuring it after installation: Arch & Gentoo. It is essentially a BSD approach to a free OS.

Now personally I am of the opinion you can save yourself a *lot* of time, brain cells, and money otherwise spent on various substances to kill or appease aforementioned brain cells in frustration, if you chose a Debian based installation. Package management that just works is a godsent. Building from source means you either have faaaar too much time on your hands or you cannot upgrade nearly as often as the binary distributions allow you to.

And if you do chose a Debian based system; and if you do want to run much of the latest software (not to mention hardware)... Ubuntu is not such a bad choice after all. Although, I must admit that I run Kubuntu (KDE 4.4.2) myself because I find Gnome to be an inflexible, unwieldy, eye sore in general. It is however true that Ubuntu adds things in their Gnome'd flavour, of questionable value such as a compositing window manager (desktop effects are sweet, and you might have chosen to install one anyway, but one can certainly question the wisdom of including it by default).

[Husar]

So if I understand that correctly, KDE and Gnome are two different graphical user interfaces for Linux and Ubuntu uses Gnome while Kubuntu and SuSe for example use KDE?

And yes, I know the console is an important part of Linux.

And I made my Ubuntu theme look dark grey and added my own wallpaper, why is that important, I thought you Linux/Win XP people don't care about graphics at all?

And there are some instabilities but those seem to be mostly related to the Flash/Opera combo and the programs itself, the OS seems to run pretty fine most of the time.

Fiddling around with it myself might just as well mean that I would break things myself and not know how to fix them, not get a single program to run for a month etc.
It's nice when it finally works etc. but I'd rather learn the basics properly through that course for example and then add to it myself, don't want to turn my Linux notebook into a day job.