A little Wine with your Linux?

• Tags:
• Programs,
• Applications,
• Emulator,
• Wine

Scott Lowe

Published: 07 Oct 2003 13:00 BST

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I mentioned that Notepad is installed. To run it, just type notepad at the prompt. Since Notepad is provided with Wine, you can run it directly. However, this isn't true for other applications. Figure B shows Notepad on Linux with the File | Open dialogue box open. There is a definite, noticeable lag during which the mouse won't even move when you first open this dialogue box.

What about other applications?
Although Notepad can certainly serve a purpose, you'll probably want to install something a tad more useful on your Linux system. A vast number of applications -- 1,604 as of this writing -- are listed in the Wine application database. This doesn't mean that the application necessarily works, but that someone has taken the time to attempt it.

Installing programs under Wine can take significant time and effort. Often, it's not a matter of sticking the CD in the system and running the installer. You have to do a lot of tweaking, and you might be lucky to get the application to start at all. That's the price you must pay to run an application on an OS that it wasn't designed to run on. To demonstrate, I'll try to install an evaluation copy of JASC's Paint Shop Pro 8.

Paint Shop Pro 8
First, I download Paint Shop Pro 8 from the JASC Web site. Then, I use this command to begin the installation:
/usr/bin/wine psp801ev.exe

where psp801ev.exe is the downloaded file. I'm greeted with the installation wisard shown in Figure C .

The wizard will install Paint Shop Pro 8 to the "C: drive" that Wine uses. Unfortunately, this is about as far as I get before I'm unceremoniously dropped back to a Wine command prompt. At that point, I type quit to exit, and the installer stops. A huge number of errors are reported in the shell screen I used to launch the Wine/PSP8 installation, as well.

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