Hi,
I've been running Mandrake 9.2 for about 6 months now and would like to upgrade to 10 for various reasons.
I use Wine quite a lot and under Mandrake 9.2 it works pretty well.
But what I don't understand is how Mandrake 10 can change the way Wine works even if I'm using the same RPMs as before.
I've used wine-20031212 on both 9.2 and 10 with identical config files and fake_windows directories.

Under kernel 2.4/MDK10 Wine doesn't work at all as other users have reported.
Under Kernel 2.6 some parts of Wine work better but generally everything is much slower - about half as fast as with 9.2.

Top lists total CPU usage of Wine at about 50% or less - is it a Kernel 2.6 prioritizing issue?
Or is it the the new ALSA drivers built in the kernel?
Changes to the Xfree86 drivers - I really don't know.

My specs:
Duron 700,
128 mb RAM.
Mandrake 10 Community Edition(clean new installation).
Nvidia 5336 grapics drivers(on both MDK9.2 and MDK10).
Soundblaster pc128 soundcard.
Identical hardware running MDK9.2 and 10.
Wine RPMs 20031212 to 20040505 same issue with them all.

Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated muchly, thanks.

I installed the latest and greatest wine mdk rpm (20040503, I think) and it, for me at least, is considerablly faster than before. Word is now pretty much completely usable. It was so sluggish before that I didn't use it for complex documents. And the printing is a lot better. But I did a clean install of mdk 10.0 official. Nothing worked right after I tried to upgrade 9.2 to 10.0.

That's good to hear.
I see you're running the Official release, maybe I'm just experiencing Community Edition problems.
Wish I knew which system updates might fix the problem.
Thanks.

SAM,

Well, it could also be that you upgraded. I had all kinds of problems with 10.0 when I used the upgrade option. I ended up copying my /home directory to a FAT32 drive and re-installing from scratch a full install. And all the problems (with a few, minor config glitches easily straightened out) went away.

But it may be better to just wait for the full official release then do a full bore install.

stunter

I re-installed Mandrake 9.2 and gave it a hard drive of it's own. Then did a clean install of Mandrake 10 on a second hard drive(both on the same machine).
When running Wine the X server is claiming 70-80% CPU usage and leaving Wine very little to run with. I'll upgrade(or is it downgrade?) the Xfree86 RPMs and see if it's an X server issue.

SAM,

Could be a xserver issue. I know that when I run an MS Office app like Word, I use about 60% CPU on load and it drops down unless I do something big (like load a DB or paste a big picture).

I have a P4/865 computer with 2 gigs of ram, so that may help some. But I have a moderate level graphics card (ATI 7200 - 64mg). I also have SCSI hard drive stuff so again, that may help some. I also use fairly high resolution so again, that will slow things down some.

stunter

The problem is not Wine I've just found. If I run the emulator Zsnes in a window it runs half as fast with MDK10 as it does under 9.2. It definitely looks like an X server issue.
I've heard that certain input devices can cause the X server to overwork, I removed evdev(a USB tablet driver) that was loading up by mistake and still no change.
strace X doesn't produce anything too unusual - I'll keep looking.

I think I have the problem solved. I'm in Mandrake 10 right now and Wine is running the best I've seen it since running it on SuSE 8.0(like a greased whippet basically).
I've got a fairly good idea what the problem was but it's hard to prove and takes a lot of messing about. When I install a Linux distribution I'm used to selecting my mouse type from a list of choices.
With the Mandrake 10 installation my ps/2 wheel mouse kept auto-detecting as "Any PS/2 and USB mice." Which irked me because I knew precisely which mouse type to select so I always fiddled with it. No matter what I selected it always magically defaulted back to "Any PS/2 and USB mice" and the mouse wheel would never work properly.
After installing the mouse just wouldn't work properly(no mousewheel for example) and Drakconf wouldn't display the proper mouse options anymore.

I've re-installed Mandrake 10 and let the installation choose my mouse for me("Any PS/2 and USB mice" as always) and bingo - problem solved. The mouse is working correctly, Drakconf is happy to change the mouse type without problems and Wine and other X applications are as fast as ever(if not faster).
I would call the problem a Mandrake 10 installation bug.
Fiddle with the default mouse options and get a nerfed mouse(in my case anyway). The slightly nerfed mouse settings confuse the X server and thus X applications like Wine become starved as X eats up CPU cycles.
I'm no Linux expert but that's as near as I can tell what the problem was and it's running fine now.

Thanks for the replies Stunter.
It was good to know that Wine should work fine on Mandrake 10 it gave me something to shoot for.
Cya.

Glad you got it working. It's similar to what I discovered installing 10.0 official. Don't mess with any of the parameters during the install, just let it choose. Alter it after it's up and running. My mouse was fine, but I had a similar problem with the network settings. I initially tried to set them correctly during the installation and it was totally screwed up and no amount of trying to correct it from drakconf worked. But when I re-installed 10.0 as a clean install (instead of upgrading 9.2), I just let it choose whatever it wanted and much like you, I was able to adjust things to correct settings from drakconf after the installation.

Interesting problem, that.

stunter

I'm seeing a few other posts here and there now in a similar vein.
Perhaps Mandrake could mention this in their Install notes: "Don't fiddle with anything until AFTER you've installed!"