Hey guys,

I've installed (I believe correctly) libgdiplus, mono, multilib, and Wine.

Now I don't know what to do. How do I 'start' wine?

I tried wineconsole, wine, and both did nothing....

You cannot "start" wine directly. Everything that wine does, is running your windows executables.

You can, however, start up the wine config tool with:

winecfg

or one of the simple preinstalled applications like:

wine notepad.exe
wine clock.exe

2 members found this post helpful.

Greetz
If you didn't know already, Wine is an acronym for "Wine Is Not Emulation" which means you are not running some version of windows within Linux. It "simply" provides a sort of translation for some labeling conventions and paths, and a library set required by many windows applications and even has a fake windows reboot (for what would windows do without rebooting for any little change?" <grin>

Wine has gotten quite good for many applications and in some cases the reduced overhead, superior memory management, superior security and superior TCP/IP stack et cetera makes for a ...well, superior runtime. In short, some apps run better in wine than they do in real windows. Additionally over the years it has become rather well documented, both from The Official Wine Headquarters and user contributed database and forums. Be sure to visit there for information both specific and general.

I'm curious now, though. If you didn't know how wine works, what windows app(s) can you not live without? Presently I only use it for a couple games and recently for assistance in running Silverlight dependent sites and services like Netflix. It is quite satisfactory for those.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for a very informative reply. I was looking to install wine so that I could then install a 32-bit version of Microsoft Excel 2010. It seems that wine works very well with 32-bit 2010 suite.

However, after using LibreOffice Calc out of neccesity (since I didn't know what to do with wine), I think it is a perfect alternative to Excel - sure, you have to learn the ins and outs of Calc, which takes a little time, but it is not hard at all.

However, I also want to run FoxIt PDF Reader, and here I have not found a suitable linux alternative. There is no good alternative to FoxIt's annotation features.

Thank you!

Thank you schmatzler. I simply ran 'wine /dir/setup.exe' and installed Office.

Then, to start up Excel, I found the EXCEL.EXE file (in /home/user/.wine directory) and ran 'wine EXCEL.EXE'.

Just thought I'd spell it out for the next user.

You're quite welcome and here's another tidbit. Many applications can be tweaked to run at top performance and in several ways. Not only does wine have a registry and regedit, but it is possible in winecfg to assign different version compatibilities for specific apps.

Say your version of Excel works best in XP but app XYZ runs better in Win7. You can add in the appropriate dialogue box that Excel is to use XP, while launching XYZ prefers Win7. Nice, huh?

Additionally, because you launch apps through wine but IN LINUX, you can add switches so that Linux gives wine what it needs most for that app. Example, I like to play World of Warcraft, so where before I learned a few tricks I just typed "wine ~enorbet/WinWoW/wow.exe" (my wow location, not universal) and actually I created a "Link to Application" on the Desktop for this, now I use a two step command.

First, being a game and this particular game, an MMORPG so it has LOTS of changing multimedia elements, I use PV's lil trick of
the above fixes a memory allocation problem that made the game somewhat unstable (it would crash a lot under certain kinds of heavy loads. Now it doesn't.)

I suppose I should include the disclaimer that it also temporarily adds some vulnerability, not major by any stretch, at least for me but although I don't use a real DMZ on my home network, I do have a hardware firewall serving all my boxes and software firewall on each individual box and I run "rkhunter" once every 2 weeks and after 9 months of use (some months, rather heavy use) I have never had even a scare, after the initial common warnings about SSH settings, which took all of 5 minutes to set right.

Then I launch the main executable thusly

This one assigns a higher priority. With the added "nice -20" switch, I can alt-tab out of WoW and launch, say Skype or TeamSpeak (both linux native apps but of considerable resource use) or even Firefox with about 20 Zillion saved and restored tabs without WoW even gasping for air, let alone crashing like it used to.

So tips and tricks can be found here at LQ as well as WineHQ. Enjoy!

1 members found this post helpful.

Wine basically acts as a collection of runtimes and libraries for Linux to translate operation calls for Windows apps into a GNU/Linux environment.

Yes, it's not an emulator.

Say for example you have Wine installed, go to a terminal and type in Wordpad. Wordpad will open using the Wine API runtime and library translation layer just as it would in Windows.

Now I will warn you ahead of time, Wine does not give kernel level application authority (Ring 0) for applications, and Wine applications, and applications ran using Wine, do not have any hardware acceleration or kernel level benefits. There are no drivers for Wine either. Wine only operates in the userspace (Ring 3).

1 members found this post helpful.

Everything on this system is humming along beautifully.

Excel is not even needed with LibreOffice, but it works great nonetheless.

FoxIt working flawlessly as well.

Very happy with Slackware. I can hardly tell this computer is on sometimes when the screen shuts off.