i was reading an older suse9.1 book and i came across a topic explaining dcom5 .can someone explain what this is and if its like wine or do i need both...thanks

dcom95 is a windows library which is often used by software installers, i think..

your best bet for all things wine is to have a look at -

http://frankscorner.org/

dcom95 / dcom98 = Distributed Component Object Model for Windows 95 and/or Windows 98.

You need Wine to install these. First setup your Wine.

A Wine section will appear in your Kmenu AFTER you install your first Windows program or AFTER you install Sidenet. You must be working in your standard user, not SU nor even ROOT.

I would go to Wine HQ and download the latest versions available for SUSE (the versions available from YaST2 are not up-to-date):

http://sourceforge.net/project/show...ackage_id=79444

Download the Wine and the Development files for your SUSE version. You may also wish to consider some additional WineTools:

http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/

And another tool to add to the beefiness of Wine, Sidenet:

wine-config-sidenet-1.8.4.tgz from http://sidenet.ddo.jp/winetips/config.html

Install Wine, then Developement, then WineTools, then go to your standard user Konsole (not as SU) and type "wine" for the ./wine folder to appear in your ./home folder.

Then put the Sidenet file in your ./home folder and extract and run as directed. It will back up your main Wine folder and put a fake Windows "C:\" drive in your ./home folder, complete with C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, etc. Then everything will work through Sidenet. This should also create a Wine catagory in your Kmenu.

Paste a Windows .exe installer program in your ./home folder (try Nullsoft's Scriptable Installer for Windows, NSIS from http://nsis.sourceforge.net/. I installed this and the Zip2EXE works great in 9.3), go to Kmenu -> Wine -> Task Manager, click on File -> New Task (Run...), Browse for the Windows .exe installer you just placed in the ./home folder and run it . Let it install to C:\Program Files\x, it is not installing to your Windows partition if your are dual-booting, it is installing to your fake C:\ drive. If Wine/Sidenet can install the Windows program (Wine is not an "end-all" and can not install ALL Windows programs) then "Viola!", it should put shortcuts on your desktop, and Kmenu under Wine, and even uninstallers if that was part of the installation process.

I thank you both for your help....thank you