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WINE—Day 54© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I have mentioned in previous journal entries that I have been tinkering with but mostly struggling with WINE. WINE is not ready for prime time. I have not looked at Crossover Office, but I suspect the Codeweaver people have put a more effort into usability. I do not want to discount the tremendous efforts put forth by the WINE developers, but the documentation is awful. Outdated too. Consider that the ~/.wine/config file is deprecated. The first clue I had about that was during several of my failed attempts to run Word I noticed that the default WINE created no config file yet ran several Windows programs just fine. Later, out of frustration and curiosity, I ran the winecfg program. The program showed a message box that the program does not actually save anything and implied the program was not functional. Mostly at the preliminary development stages and provided only for show and tell. However, I also received a message that the proper way to adjust font resolution was through a system registry entry, not the config file. Strangely, the winecfg program is not as disfunctional as that original message declared. I happened to discover the Drives tab, and while playing around with that I received a message from Kate that the system.reg file I had opened had changed. Hmm. I thought this program was not functional! Eventually I figured out what had changed and that is when I discovered one of the great mysteries that had been alluding me from the beginning. Early in my frustrations I knew that WINE was not recognizing my sym links to my mounted NT4 D: and E: partitions. My fiddling with the winecfg program had created a registry key that specified which drive letters to recognize. Finally I had a clue how to get WINE to recognize my NT4 drives! The key behind my effort is that I do not want to install Word. I want only to import registry entries from NT4 so I can configure Word the same as I already have done in NT4. I don’t know if I could come close to imitating that configuration from scratch. To think of all the patches and tweaking I’d have to install seems a waste of energy. By importing registry entries from Windows, I have had some nominal success in configuring Word on my Slackware side. However, I think part of my problem now is I have not yet converted my E: partition to FAT32 and when I launch Word in Slackware, that causes file permission problems. Yet, now that I have a way to convince WINE to recognize my D: and E: partitions, I might be able to progress further. Whomever is in charge of the WINE documentation needs to provide some serious revisions. No, that person is not me, and I’m just sharing what I have learned. If I ever succeed in configuring WINE and Word then I’ll pass my notes to the documentation maintainer. For now, however, the existing documentation is useless. * * * As I contemplated installing and configuring WINE, I looked hard at what I might have to do to improve my existing Windows environment in order to provide as equal a shared environment as possible. Bear in mind that I have no C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files\Common Files, or C:\Program Files\Media directories on my C: partition. Some easy registry hacks from long ago moved those pointers to my D: partition. I also long ago moved my “Application Data” directory to my E: partition and edited several related registry keys. There also is no silly My Documents, My Music, etc. directories on my system. My E: partition is my sole data container. I also have no Internet Explorer related directories such as Cookies, Favorites, History and Temporary Internet Files because I long ago ripped Explorer and Outlook from my system. Here are some things I am in the process of doing:
In all, a short list because of the way I originally had installed and configured Office and Word. However, I am growing impatient with WINE and am becoming more tempted to download and test the trial version of Crossover Office. I want to migrate, not become a WINE troubleshooter or developer. Finis. |
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