wine: getting certain programs to work on linux
So wine and PlayonLinux seem to be a little bit funky lately. I was having no problems with my wine and playonlinux installs up until maybe January or so this year. Any new OS installations I've made since then have been problematic, though, particularly for PlayonLinux, which prior to then has always worked smoothly and well for me.As of this week, the following setup works for me on MX Linux 17:
1) Use the original release of MX 17, not the newer .1 release, to make your initial OS installation. The original release seems to have fewer wine-related issues for some reason.
2) Use MX Package Installer instead of Synaptic to install wine. Search for winehq and install winehq-staging, which is what the MX Linux team calls its supported wine package. Doing it piecemeal by yourself in Synaptic seems to have horrible results :) Then run winecfg from terminal to get wine set up the way you want it.
3) After that is done, you can add winetricks and Play on Linux if you like.
(As of my latest MX 17 installation this week, I have not managed to get Play on Linux working properly. With the 17.1 MX release, it can't even seem to create a drive - it looks like it does but nothing happens. With the original 17 release, it can at least create a drive (but it is taking much longer than it used to to download the needed components, YMMV) but it crashes on any attempt to install or run any programs at all. So it's pretty much useless for me at this point.)
4) System wine seems to work pretty well for me at present, using the above installation approach. It was able to install and run all the programs I threw at it without any problems - except for Magic Mail Monitor 3, which is a program I really can't live without. (Someday I should try to pay someone to port it to Linux and make it native...)
So this post is actually about how to get MMM3 working properly on MX Linux 17.
This should work with any of the three latest versions of MMM3. I haven't tried it on anything older than v2.94b1 or v2.95 at this time.
If you keep trying to run MMM3 in wine and it simply won't start, it is probably because it is missing a dll or two.
Previously, the dll it required was mfc42.dll. I seem to recall that it was a little picky about which mfc42.dll it would accept. I think I remember downloading a lot of different copies of mfc42.dll from various online websites before I found one that worked for it.
Now, it seems to be looking for a new dll named mfc100.dll. I believe the developer Grigsoft mentioned that they had updated the program so it now uses 2010 redistributables, so this could be why things changed. (My old copy of MMM v2.95 on MX 16 runs fine with just mfc42.dll and without mfc100.dll)
To obtain mfc100.dll if you don't have it, just download the appropriate redistributable pack. The 64 bit version is named vcredist_x64.exe and the 32 bit version is vcredist_x86.exe. MX17 seems to install 32bit wine by default, if I am not mistaken, so that's the version I used.
Just use wine program loader to install the vcredist exe file, and then go into the windows system 32 subfolder in your wine folder, and look for the file named mfc100.dll which should now have miraculously appeared there. Copy it over to the MMM3 folder, and you are good to go.
* For some reason, MMM3 doesn't pick up on dll files that are in the system 32 folder. You have to put the dll files actually in the same folder as the magic.exe program itself for it to work. I don't know if mfc42.dll is still needed to run the program, but I didn't bother to remove the copy that I already had. I just added the mfc100.dll file so there are now two dll files in the MMM3 folder. It now runs very smoothly and quickly on MX17.
Update, Sat, 5-19-2018, 3:07:18 PM
Just finished another MX17 install and this time around, I did NOT need to add the mfc100.dll file in order for MMM3 to work. It could be because there was a pre-existing home drive which was re-used from a previous MX16 install in this case, and the existing home drive already had fully configured PlayonLinux/wine folders with programs already installed on them. There must be something that was installed in previous versions of MX Linux which isn't being installed in the current version, but I have no idea what. Anyway, at least it's an easy fix in this case - if it doesn't work for you, just get that dll file and stick it in the MMM3 program folder! :)
tags: magic mail monitor, PlayonLinux, MXlinux
MX16 had a big batch of system updates recently after being quiet for some time. The next day I had all sorts of weird errors. Not sure if it had anything to do with the updates, as I had also been futzing about trying to install MX17 on a flash drive and messing with GRUB etc at the same time.[Aside: As I think I've mentioned before, each succeeding version of MX Linux has been much better than the previous one. I've really been extremely impressed with this OS. MX15 was unusable for me for a few reasons. MX 16 worked well enough for me to use it as my primary. And MX 17 has been practically flawless - I enjoy it so much it's ridiculous!!! :)]
Anyway the computer was having difficulty shutting down and complaining about horrifying things like segfaults and mysqld refusing to stop. And swap not deactivating properly, which happens a lot. I think I borked the original partitioning and installation for this PC (MX 16) so its been weird ever since. Probably doesn't help that it has to share space with Windows, which keeps trying to take over and reset the BIOS to boot to Windows All The Time whenever I have to use it (fortunately not very often).
All this time I've been using native Steam on Linux and playing only those games which Steam supports on Linux.Last week, however, I bought some games which were on sale but were Windoze only. I don't really like to support devs who don't support Linux, but once in a (loooong) while I make an exception. In this case I actually made the exception for the sake of a test. I was curious to see how well Steam would work on Wine, and if I could play windoze games that way. I figured it was a good opportunity to test this since the games were on massive sale (and I mean like pennies).
All in all I'm really impressed with how far things have come. Installing Steam on PlayonLinux was incredibly easy, since it's one of the built-in pre-configured options. Just pick it out of the list and go. It gave an error message and said that PlayonLinux had crashed towards the end of the installation, but it didn't seem to matter. By that point the Steam app was already up and running and downloading updates for itself. After it was done I logged in and installed the new windoze games and played for a while.
It was a little bit laggy, not that noticeable but definitely not as fast or smooth as if I were playing in the native version, but overall I was quite pleased. It's best I think if used with undemanding games, unless you have a high end computer.
tags: steam
Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:50:19 +0000KPT Whois is one of those ancient programs that I've been lugging along with me from computer to computer, OS to OS, over so many years that I can't even count back to when I first started using it. There are plenty of Linux native programs that do what this program does, but I guess I just keep using this one even though it's a windoze program because I'm too used to it by now :)
KPT, by the way, stands for "Karen's Power Tools".
If you run the KPT Whois install from scratch from within Play on Linux, you'll find that it gives you an error msg about needing vbrun files. You can get the vbrun pack from her website.
Although it's an exe, don't try to install it with Wine as nothing will happen. It's actually just a zip pack. So open it with Archive Manager and extract all the files inside to a folder. Then copy all those files into the KPT Whois directory inside Wine. KPT Whois should run fine after that.
[Update, Thu, 3-03-2016,10:31:48 PM:
I stopped using KPT WhoIs some time ago as I finally found a much better native replacement, Network Tools (gnome-nettool). It does what KPT WhoIs did and much, much more! Basically it's a GUI front end for a whole bunch of useful commands, including ping, traceroute, whois, and netstat. You can install it from Synaptic.
Addendum - I just found out that Karen Kenworthy passed away in April 2011 :( RIP Karen, I used a lot of your programs in the old windoze days and found them very handy! The site is currently dead. I don't know if someone bought the domain name. The old site is still viewable on the wayback machine though. You have to go back to about 2014 to find a snapshot with the old pages on it.]
tags: KPT WhoIs, KarenWare, Karen Kenworthy, Network Tools, gnome-nettool, ping, netstat, traceroute, whois, synaptic, GUI
Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:30:22 +0000After upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 from 12.04, I started having problems with some of my old windoze programs that I was using Wine to run. Mostly in the notification tray area - their icons would sometimes not show up, or vanish suddenly. There were also a few other minor problems, which I will detail the fixes for below.
For Magic Mail Monitor, the tray icon is kind of important since it changes depending on whether you have incoming mail or not. So it's a problem if you can't see it.
To fix the tray icon issue for MMM, I installed a new copy of Magic Mail Monitor v2.94b19 (the last most recent version available on sourceforge) using Play on Linux, into a new virtual drive instead of the system wine folder. I am currently running it on the newest version of Wine that was available via Play on Linux at the time of my installation, v.1.5.30-1.5.30-1.
The PlayonLinux version seems to be able to keep the icon showing in the systray ok, whereas with the current regular Wine (v1.4.1), icons seem to sporadically vanish from the systray, especially if some other program, especially a Wine windows program, is started and also goes to the tray.
MMM also needs MFC42.dll. It does not like some versions but there is one old one I had from 2000 that seems to work for it. There was a 1997 one which did not seem to work - your mileage may vary!
The dll can be placed in the windows/system32 folder or in MMM's own folder, both seem to work ok, with one coda. In Play on Linux, MMM has its very own Wine environment in its own virtual Wine folder, so I just put it in the system32 folder there. In my main system-wide Wine setup, however, I had to put it in the MMM folder because some other programs choked if it was in the system32 folder.
The other thing i had to fix was an issue with a .font.conf file. I found that that was what originally stopped a lot of wine progs from starting up after the update to 13.04.
All you have to do is look for the font configuration file named in the error msg (run the problem program from the terminal to see the error message, otherwise you won't be able to tell what's wrong). Then comment out the line that is causing the hiccup.
In my case, the problem file was:
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/50-user.conf and the line that had to be commented out was:
~/.fonts.conf You can just use the usual html method of commenting out a line, eg.
< ! -- ~/.fonts.conf -- >Apparently it is ok to comment it out as it does not seem to be causing any problems by its removal. In fact my system seems to be running faster and sharper than ever, though I am not sure if that is just an illusion.
tags: magic mail monitor, email, email clients, pop3 checker
Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:11:16 +0000And yes, I mean the real Eudora Pro, not the bastard child called Penelope :P
Not much to say about this, as it seems to work pretty damn well in Ubuntu with Wine set to XP compatibility. (Last most recent version of Eudora Pro, paid)
The main issues I have noticed are:
Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:06:20 +0000Magic Mail Monitor finally works in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS!
I was never able to get it to work before, but I tried again recently and for some strange reason this time around it worked!
All I did was copy over the entire folder of the already installed and working copy of MMM from my Windows machine, and paste it into the Program Files folder in my Wine directory. I have MMM set for WinXP compatibility in Wine.
Wed, 07 Nov 2012 23:39:56 +0000I've noticed something interesting lately. If I mount a drive in TrueCrypt on Linux and then run some windows programs using Wine, I will not be able to unmount the TrueCrypt drive until those wine programs have been closed. This is so even when I am not accessing anything on that TrueCrypt drive with those wine/windows programs. I'm not sure why this is so. Maybe something about the way the explorer program has to run when wine is active?
Anyway, if you happen to have this problem where TrueCrypt keeps telling you the drive can't be unmounted because it's in use or whatever, yet you know that you're not using it for anything, check to see if you have any windows programs running in wine, and shut them down. You don't have to kill wine itself, you only need to kill the windows programs that are running. You may find that you are then suddenly able to unmount the drive again at that point. This has worked for me pretty much every time I have had an unmounting issue with TC in Linux to-date.
(Yes, I am referring to the Linux version of TrueCrypt, being run on Linux)
[Addendum, Mon, 8-17-2015, 9:52:43 PM:
Noticed recently that one of those annoying background KDE programs causes the same problem. I forget what it's called. Anyway you know what I mean. The new programs they added in recent KDE releases that always start up if you try to run a KDE program (eg. kmail) and then keep running in the background even after you shut down the KDE program. Maybe the search database function? It's even worse than wine - you have to get a list of PIDs and kill them off one by one to get rid of the culprit, otherwise it is completely impossible to unmount TC. Fortunately Dolphin doesn't seem to produce this effect, otherwise I'd be in deep doo doo since I can't live without Dolphin. I believe it was KMail which caused the problem for me, and luckily I don't normally use KMail at all, I was only fiddling with it for fun the day it happened...]
tags: TrueCrypt, Dolphin, KDE
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:05:37 +0000I have just found the most wonderful program :) It's called Drawers.
It's dock-like but integrates really beautifully into the Ubuntu Launcher bar. The entire feel is very clean and looks wonderful (because really you don't see it at all, unlike, say, Cairo dock), and so far it has worked quite well for me. No crashes yet - also unlike Cairo dock!
Sat, 20 Oct 2012 02:24:47 +0000I just discovered to my delight and amazement that eReader and eBook Studio (formerly from Palm Digital Media, now from eReader.com) install and run beautifully on Wine.
There is only one drawback that I know of, and admittedly it is a bit of a doozy, but I can live with it - the programs do not exit cleanly and leave little echoes of their processes behind in the process tree. This isn't a huge problem unless you just used eReader to view an ebook that was stored on a mounted drive, such as a TrueCrypt drive.
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