Before we start ... I've looked at a lot of posts, in the archives here, over the last few days on WINE installation - most seem to say to clueless n00bs "use a package manager / it just works".

So I thought that installation would be a breeze.

No.

I installed using slapt-get. "wine" works, at least gives the use info, "winemine" works - but I can't run any apps without it crashing X. No error logs seem to be created, nothing logged to the /var/log files.

I decided to manually install. It didn't really help except to point out some missing deps. So I now have 0.9.15 installed.

Now, a couple of posts mention running winecfg once installed (thought I can't find where it tells you to do this on the WINE site?). So I tried that, basically it just creates a ~/.wine-XXXXX (where XXXXX is a random string) directory but never finishes the process and so doesn't name it to be ~/.wine . As this is my first wine install I don't know whether it's writing everything it needs?? I did try just renaming ~/.wine-XXXXX to .wine but it didn't seem to like it.

So elsewhere someone mentions using wineprefixcreate (again can't find where it says this in WINEs install instructions). So I try that.

Great I can now get ~/.wine .

Skip this I just figured it out whilst writing the post ...

winecfg takes 4 minutes (I just timed it) to run but I finally have it going. The audio tab locks the whole thing up (I don't want to sit and wait to see if it eventually does something).

Running apps is another story.

"wine notepad" takes about 10 minutes to write anything to screen and slows the system noticeably. "ies4linux" runs and suprised me the other day when, it felt like 20 minutes later, it just popped up an IE6 window. The net connection is painfully slow (I'm on megabit, it's more like 28.8K).

Where am I going wrong?

So it appears the problem was my firewall. If I do "# /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall stop" then it pops up straight away. Now I just need to find what ports to open from and to where?

---

strace winecfg gives an almost endless stream (that appears to repeat) of:

Open up your firewall so wine can roam free? sounds dangerous!

...aaron

Personnally, after I install wine, I've always used winetools. It can setup everything, and ibstall needed core apps too.

As far as your slowdown goes, I have no clue

What application are you trying to install? I have been testing every version of wine for about 2 years now with PokerStars and never ran into the problem your describing (I have always tested on an up to date Slackware, NOT current). Turning off your firewall shouldn't ever be the solution. I have never had to do this with PokerStars and it connects to the net every time I use it.

How did you install 0.9.15? Are you running 10.2 or current? If 10.2, do you have all the updates installed? If current, you should considered compiling wine yourself instead of a pre-comiplied package (if you do decide to compile yourself you should also install fontforge first, as this will give your applications better looking fonts).

After the install, I have found that it is best to use 'wineprefixcreate' to setup the fake windows tree and then use 'winecfg' to set at least sound to OSS (OSS seems to work better then the others at this stage of wine's development in any DE/WM I have tried). FYI, 'wineprefixcreate' is also used to update an existing tree when installing a newer version of wine.

If you are having trouble with a particular application, you can always try running it under a different windows compatablity (wine defaults to win2k). If all else fails, take a look around http://bugs.winehq.org/. Chances are someone else may have ran into this problem before and there might be a solution already. You can also ask someone at FreeNode's #WineHQ IRC for a solution to your problem.

MagicMan

Cwwilson721: winetools is obsolete. It's been replaced by winedoors.

See:
Linux.com | Wine Doors opens Windows under Linux

pbhj: you're not using a very underpowered computer, are you? Are you having trouble with any other applications?

dugan-
winedoors is SVN version only. I can wait until a release version is up. Playing with a 'alpha' version at best is not what I want.

Plus, it requires gnome. Gnome does not go on my system. No way. No how. My personal choice.

And as far as 'obsolete' goes, that is an opinion. My version of winetools does a fine job for what I need it for.