installing win programs from floppy to run in wine
 

suse 10 on dual boot with Win 98
want to install fmpro 2.1 to run under wine (only Win program I wish to keep now ).

1) I set up config file according to book "Beginning SUSE Linux" and first floppy started installing apparently correctly, but got to asking for second floppy when could only get a warning (error) message asking me to ensure the souce path and the disk were correct. Have not managed to solve that problem as yet and now feel the approach at 2 below is the better one.

2) While looking in forums to find help I found that simply using /windows/C/fmpro wine fmpro.exe almost worked. Amazingly easy, but:- I say almost, as got as far as opening first record, but then mouse pointer is vibrating plus cannot move to other records.

Any pointers useful. Perhaps I should install latest version of wine first as the version on the Suse CDs is 20050725.

Cheers
dickal

First, do you know if your app is supported by WINE?

I have a similar issue in installing Photoshop where I have 2 CDs (original + upgrade). Swapping the CDs derails the install process--never solved it.

Generally, I am not impressed with WINE or the commercial version (Crossover Office). This said, I am using it and there is some advantage is buying Crossover to get the limited support that they offer.

Did you check out the Wine knowledge base to see how well the program is supported? That should be the first place for you to look for installation tips.

Just an idea, but how about copying the floppies to your hard disk as .iso image files? I'm not sure if Wine could handle them as-is, but they could be mounted through loopback if necessary. Then set up Wine with two (or more) "floppy drives" that actually point towards the iso copies. That way Wine will see them all at once instead of having to swap out disks.

Not sure if it'll work, but it may be worth a shot. It's a good idea to create and store iso's of floppies for backup purposes in any case, since floppies are so unreliable. You can probably fit your entire collection on a single cd-r.

And finally, yes, I recommend updating to the latest version of Wine. Since they've gone to a beta release cycle it's been improving much more rapidly than before. There's been a noticable improvement in the last few versions.