Hello all,

I remember the day Doom sucked. That was the day I brought the Descent demo copy to the 386. Never played Doom again.

Installed Descent a good few times over the years along with 2 and 3, mods and add-ons. Always on a Windows partition though.

So nowadays I'm Linux only but found a port for 2 and 1 and the AUR has that with dependencies, so the heavy lifting is largely done. All I need now are the game files which are wrapped up in an exe file here on my desktop.

Back when I used a Windows partition, it woulda been super easy. Just install there, reboot to Linux and copy over what I need. Need a new idea.

And if I wanted Wine, I wouldn't be bothering with any of this.

Is there a way to extract what I need from an exe file on a Linux system?

If not, I'll bite the bullet and bring a USB stick to a friend's Windows, install, copy the goods and bring 'em back home.

Sure be nice to have an easier way though as I'm also looking at other games requiring the same dance. Never played Morrowwind, also on the AUR. If this works...

Thnx for all suggestions. Games'd be good.

I have not tried this, but if you run and it reports it is an SFX or zip file you may be able to unpack it using unzip. (If it reports another format, the unpacker for that format.) Many of the fame install exe files for Windows are simply a wrapped SFX.

What is your problem with wine? In your case, you could install wine, use it to run the exe and unpack the files, then remove wine and move the files where you need them.

Was worth a shot and a good trick to remember. Thanks for that.

/Desktop/desc/setup_descent2.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

But alas, not lucky on this one.

My problems with Wine are the Windows files it uses. Windows has proven themselves unworthy of trust. When using a dual boot and booting Windows, I literally have to unplug the internet wire to keep it in line.
My Linux is nearly always online, though. With Windows files on a mounted partition in Wine, it may be contacted or attempt contacts and all Windows connections are forbidden here.
So I would also then have to install jails, cells, or whatever the name is to isolate any installation. Pretty huge hassle to unzip something.

And then theres the Wine installation itself to be described as buggy at best. Starts with searches for which versions will work for what versions and it's dependencies. I have messed with it way back and found it a real pain in the *. I'm certain it would be far easier to just go to a Windows computer today.

I would like an open-source Wine-like program with no Windows or Alphabet Co. files if one ever comes out. I like the idea, but there's nothing like that yet that I know of. Till then, if I gotta do it at home, I'll make a dual-boot.

Looks like I better grab the thumbdrive.

I have used wine on Debian and variants with no such problems. I must admit, I have not on Arch. I have not compiled Wine from source for years, and that may be where that issue lies.

Another thought: using lxc to create a special container to install wine and extract the files, then copy the files out of the lxc container. Then, when you are happy, destroy the container.

Give Reactos a whirl
https://reactos.org

Run it in virtualbox thats about as safe as it gets

Not bad advice for many things, but he only wants to EXTRACT it and then run it in Linux. Last I checked, ReactOS still does not do drive sharing, so you would have to pack up the files and transfer them using network file transfer protocols (FTP/SFTP, etc.). That seems unwieldy for the purpose.

That said, it should work using VB. His "sneaker net" using the USB key may be faster than getting VB installed, running, and loaded with ReactOS.

I may be screaming uncle Wine soon and be trying these containers/jails/cells I read about a couple years back. I need to learn about them eventually. Maybe sooner than I thought.

Harshly though, I found something that should be perfect for me and is easy as 7zip. innoextract. However, its been four hours now trying to get past the absolutely required hash check. First catch is you can only use the user's keyring and neither pacman nor yaourt seem to wanna use that one leaving makepkg which is acting buggy about it now. Truly, this guy is more paranoid than me by far. He may have hidden the numbers in code somewhere in old dream diaries.
mkpkg says root won't do and thats got me pausing. Gparted can destroy my whole filesystem in a couple clicks and runs on root. Perhaps this exe opener destroys worlds with the wrong argument and thus has the highest security. Is innoextract really so dangerous?. Think I'll take a pause before using SU privileges to install an unzipper. If its that dangerous, I could probly' do without it and just switch to studying containers. Something is clearly wrong.

So I learned all about our 2 keyrings complete with all the common misunderstandings and arguments for and against. Didn't help this though.

Try again.

When images, icons, language files etc. are included in a windows exe files, they are called "resources". I did see a "resource explorer" program once, which could open an exe, list the included resources and extract them. It was a delphi program for windows. In fact it was one of the sample applications of an old delphi version. But that was long ago.

Search something like "resource explorer/extractor".

Just flashed on the fact that these containers people are suggesting are cloud apps. I can't even conceive of why a cloud would help.

As I understand it, clouds hold data for thousands and some even millions of people making them a sweet score for hackers. Prime targets worthy of the best with the best tools. All run by massive corporations I should for some reason trust. I guarantee they will all be hacked. The prize is too worthy to be protected. "Hoard too much jade and precious things and they can no longer be protected". A bad idea in principle.

I'm just surprised again noone suggested any jails or cells which do exactly the same thing entirely within my own environment. Kinda like creating a user within a user with no rights or only those necessary. From what I've read, I would be able to totally isolate programs there, hence the names. I seem to remember Linux and Windows each calling it something different. Been a while. Way better and more secure than any container. Never monkeys in the middle. Even works when the net is down. And deletes are permanent.

So today I'm thinking I'll look into what they've been doing in this jail stuff and if it seems a match for the project of caged Wine right here on my drive.

And try again.

OK, there is a misunderstanding here. Containers are not cloud apps. Containers can be used to host cloud apps, and since they make applications and environments more secure and make better use of the hardware investment they are COMMON on the cloud, but they are a virtualization app somewhat like VMWARE or VirtualBox. The difference is that many of the other solutions do FULL or PARA virtualization, while containers are KERNEL based virtualization. It makes them faster with an overhead between 0.5% and 3% as opposed to XEN or VMWARE which gets down to about 10% if well tuned, or VirtualBox which runs around 30%. As a result a box that supports 3 concurrent running guests using Virtualbox might run 200 containers without significant slowdown.

My recommendation to use a container (ON YOUR MACHINE) was so you could install wine IN the container, do the install and extract the files, copy the files you need to the host machine, then delete the container leaving no traces of wine or its prerequisites.

If you are totally unfamiliar with virtualization tools, perhaps that USB key is the best option for now.

Sounds very much designed for web hosters and I know some torrent providers who like them. Web applications are well-placed there as they don't work without it. I may follow suit one day. Just the wrong tool for the job at the moment.

Discovered my Androids can have innoextract yesterday. Installed easily and was supposed to work in an easy Android way. Tried on two models without success without inno even recognizing exe files much less checking if its inno or not. Just nothing.
So, no big. installed a terminal. Bunch of them, but found one to work. Had a whole man on the pc and set to it... and stopped there. Nothing. Not even a man. I checked /bin and no listing even. A totally invisible flaccid install on both devices. Quack.

Eureka! I hope. I will run Puppy on a USB. Forums say Ubu can do so Puppy should. If not, Ubu live then. Innos on their repository. Plan G? Good thing I'm not in a hurry.

Been a week or so. tried many ways and innoextract finally got installed. It wasn't installable without more advanced methods than I knew, but I know them now. Instead of using pacman which uses makepkg, I had makepkg use pacman.

At any rate. To open an inno-based exe, I now just type innoextract file.exe and get all my files. For those not using a minimalist system it should be real easy to get.

So I'm off to move my Descent2 files and get 'em installed. Whole 'nother project but got all the pieces now.

Solved.