Problem with WINE install (and LTSpice) under Linux? 32-bit?
 

I have never wanted to run WINE, but after weeks of stubbornly strugggling with the gEDA suite, I finally decided to give WINE and LTSpice a try. There is just far too little support for gEDA, and so much more readily available support for LTSpice.

I started (after updating) with:

The system loaded both wine and wine64-bin, which I assumed was correct since I'm running 64-bit Linux (Debian).

But when I attempted to run LTSpice I get a warning message saying I should instead be running wine-bin:i386. Re-reading the WINE FAQ I now see "that Wine for 64-bit actually runs in 32-bit mode" (except for the experimental 64-bit version).

OK, so I remove wine64-bin, then follow the warning message's menu of steps which include

and then try:

At this point apt-get shows me a long list of dependencies it wants to load and that it will also need to remove libc-bin!

Huh? That does not seem like a smart thing to do.

So what am I doing wrong? I see lots of posts suggesting how easy WINE and LTSpice are to install and use, so I must be doing something wrong.

Ideas?

Thanks,
Keith Ostertag

It's really weird that no one has offered to help me with this. There are obviously several on this board who use WINE.

Anyone?

I found out what I needed to do:

I needed first to upgrade my dpkg. I discovered this while researching a different problem. Now when I do:

then I can check with:

I can confirm that it worked.

I haven't followed through yet with loading WINE, but I suspect this will solve my problem with this thread.

Keith

Normal wine and windows programs are 32bit. Wine64 still has little software and is mad anyhow.

You need a multilib system (64 & 32 bit libs). gEDA may be your choice. I'm in the same field (Electronics) and don't use much of it. There's several front ends for spice, Kicad is good, pcb is quick, and xcircuit even has autoroute, iirc. I also loathe the Athena widget set. EveNot to be ignored is the implementation on n Xilinx ISE has a reasonable simulator. You don't have to go near wine to run this stuff. There's linux versions of nearly everything. And the things that need windows (National Instruments, PCAD, etc are so tied up with licensing they never run under wine anyhow.

Yea, I prefer gEDA suite, but there is not a lot of community support for it right now. I use ngspice, gschem, and pcd, (a little), but I think I will try LTSpice as well since it is so much easier to get help with it, particularly on this board. I'm just a hobyist and a lot of these programs (and electronics) are still over my head... But learning is fun!

Keith Ostertag

ok. you're going with wine. I'll presume your user has run winecfg. If you have a screwed up install in ~/.wine, it may be better to run
rm -rf ~/.wine
winecfg

To test wine, run 'winemine' or 'winefile' which are built in and should work. Get winetricks, which is a script for fixing things in wine. Run 'winetricks gecko corefonts' at a minimum. That installs the installer, and the core fonts. Now check ltspice on appdb.winehq.org and see what your chances are.

Lastly, try the install in an xterm. If it spews too much, run
wine /path/to/ltspice_installer 1>1.txt 2>2.txt

EDIT: I downloaded it and it installed here with zero issues. I very much suspect your wine install.

1.txt will be program output, 2.txt will be program errors. Wine runs a bit like a family of teenagers getting out of the house. Inside there's hassle, rudeness, internecine savagery, theft, shouting, screaming etc, and then they all file out into the car all silent & polite like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths :-/.

If you get nothing meaningful, go the long road
WINEDEBUG=+msi wine /path/to/ltspice_installer >wine.log 2&1. That WILL be big.

Hey business_kid-

Just want to thank you for the detailed post, very helpful. I really appreciate it.

It may be awhile until I get the time to try it again.

Later,
Keith

This dragged on for several weeks... but I finally found out that I needed to do a dist-upgrade, for some reason, before the wine install went right. Thanks again to business_kid for the tips- I never would have known about winetricks otherwise :-)

Keith

yeah wine is very finicky. its always better to run a linux native program when possible.

I agree totally, and am not happy about using wine. I still don't have it running smoothly...

However, I struggled with gEDA for three months! The community support for electrical/electronic software is tiny with Linux, and huge with Windows, at this time.

BTW- thanks for posting that link to the LTSpice alternatives- that's a reminder for me to look at the other linux native electronics programs other than gEDA.

Keith

I forgot you were in Electronics.

There are two distros aimed specifically at Electronics.
1. Fedora's Electronic Spin. I have it, and it has nearly everything compiled and behaving geda, simulators, pcb programs ides (Pic, atmel mps430, arm) - it really is quite well featured. It's biggest disadvantage is that it is Fedora, and Fedora 18 has met a lot of criticism over it's installer. I had my own war - bug dutifully filed and ensuing argument with maintainer won. I got running by booting a slackware kernel with it and I only updated once. I'm just not ready for the hassle updating a second time (Which you should, it is said). Fedora is a 'you try before they buy' distro for RHEL. Going online is not automatic and I keep it that offline, and just work in it. For electronics, it's probably the best around. I live in Slackware.

2. The other is a suse distro done as an image (usable on usb keys, etc) only 32 bit but has a lot of stuff also. No longer maintained. I tried it then deleted, because Fedora had it all.