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Wine has been in perpetual alpha stage since it first came out. New releases/versions are released about once a month. Several newsgroups track the latest release of Wine, including comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine. The different versions are referred to according to when they were released. The file format would be Wine-<yearmonthday>.tar.gz. It is doubtful, at least to this author, that Wine will ever be anything other than an alpha product. This is because volunteers develop it, and Windows is changing enough to keep the volunteers busy until the cows come home.
Wine comes on the CD-ROM with this book. It can also be downloaded from numerous sites. Some of the more common sites for downloading Wine are
sunsite.unc.edu://pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-970804.tar.gz tsx-11.mit.edu://pub/linux/ALPHA/Wine/development/Wine-970804.tar.gz ftp.infomagic.com://pub/mirrors/linux/wine/development/Wine-970804.tar.gz aris.com://pub/linux/ALPHA/Wine/development/Wine-970804.tar.gz
Patches are also available. If you have previously loaded a version, the same locations should have files with the same name, but with a diff instead of the tar. For example, on Sunsite's site, I found the following:
Wine-970629.diff.gz 29-Jun-97 14:07 32k Wine-970629.tar.gz 29-Jun-97 14:08 1.4M Wine-970720.diff.gz 20-Jul-97 13:51 83k Wine-970720.tar.gz 20-Jul-97 13:51 1.4M Wine-970804.diff.gz 04-Aug-97 13:18 68k Wine-970804.tar.gz 04-Aug-97 13:19 1.4M
There were actually versions dating back to March, but this shows the difference between the two types of files, particularly in the file size.
Installation of Wine is simple. After you gunzip the file and untar the file, follow the directions in the README file. Included in the README file is how to compile the source code as well as how to configure it.
Running Wine is also a simple process. Assuming you already have X running, open an xterm window, and, at the shell prompt, type the following:
wine [program name]
I know that Solitaire works under Wine, so let me give you an example of how to run Solitaire. Solitaire is located in the /windows directory on my C: drive. Under Red Hat Linux, the C:
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drive is referred to as /doc/c. Therefore, to run the Solitaire program (sol.exe) under Linux, I simply type the following:
wine /dos/c/windows/sol.exe
And, poof, just like magic, a window pops up, and I can now play Solitaire!
The most common problem I have seen when trying to run a Windows application, especially for the first time, is that the MS-DOS partition is not mounted under my Red Hat Linux filesystem.
The easiest check for this is to check your mounts with the mount command. If it is not mounted, try mounting it manually. If it will mount, you might want to consider placing it in your /etc/fstab file so that it will automatically get mounted during startup of Linux.
If the filesystem is mounted and it still does not work, check the path statements in the wine.conf file. All letters in the path must be lowercase.
This chapter gives you a glimpse of the importance of planning an activity and providing all of the necessary steps involved in changing a system. These steps are even more vital in a production system. As a reminder, a system administrator should
Communication is the key to success in system administration, as it is with life. You have many tools to enable you to communicate with other users on the system.
The chapter takes a brief look at problem determination. Although without knowing specifics it is difficult to get too much into the problems, knowing where to look for the log information is a good start. As a matter of fact, knowing where to look for help (such as mailing lists, man pages, and newsgroups) is also a good place to start. As a side note, understanding permissions is another one of the keys to system administration.
As a bonus, this chapter presents a look at Wine. As the system that you are using is probably an Intel-based box, you do have the ability to run Windows applications. The Wine application enables the use of some Windows applications under the Linux environment.