hey all, very inexperienced with using wine here. i've got this program i'd like to use under wine because it's windows only, but having some trouble getting it to work.

the program is DDS-Lite , and the free trial version is only good for 20 uses, so i'm afraid i've only got a limited amount of shots to get this thing going before having to possibly reinstall wine and the DDS program to get around the trial license.

anyways, here's what i know:

fresh install of wine, from source, using their packaged installer-tool. worked fine, and i can run notepad fine, so i assume wine is functioning properly.

downloaded and installed DDS-Lite (through wine), and the install seemed to work fine, although there were some errors at the end, but they appeared to be about being unable to create shortcuts. the install process finished fine, and the installer exited.

now, trying to run the program (wine DDS.exe -- or -- wine //Path//TO//DDS.exe), my CPU usage jumps up to 100% and stays there, and the program never opens.

i'm reading the wine documentation, but there seems to be a myriad of different configurations to try to deal with programs that don't want to play nice, and as i said, i'm not sure if the program is keeping track of the attempts i'm making at using it and the trial license might expire before i get it working.

anyone with more wine experience maybe able to suggest a more direct route to troubleshooting this than just fiddling with an unlimited amount of different configuration settings?

keep in mind, wine is development software... a good deal of programs refuse to work with wine. the list is of working programs is growing, but sometimes wine doesn't know how to handle a certain api call and crashes. You just have to keep that in mind in dealing with wine and if something doesn't work, you just have to accept it.

I know that wasn't any help, sorry...

You're definitely right...

1) it IS development software, and I understand and accept that, and
2) that wasn't any help. hehe, just kidding (but only a little..)

On the one hand, it would be nice to have the program work quickly and cleanly right after installing, but I understand this isn't going to be the case in a lot of instances. After only limited use of the DDS-Lite program at school (the teacher insists we use it for db-modeling and forward engineering of the code), it seems like a nice program a lot of ppl could benefit from.

But, since it doesn't work, I'm definitely not averse to trying to get my own hands dirty figuring out what's going wrong and where... just not sure where to start. I'm hoping someone with good ideas when it comes to stuff wine-ish might be willing to donate a few if I promise to do my share of the grunt work.