Recently in Wine Category

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

Sure I've tried Wine before. But never successfully.

I took the plunge recently, forking over $20 for the Bordeaux GUI front-end for Wine, the non-emulator that allows users of Linux (and Solaris and FreeBSD) to run Windows applications on their Unix-like computers.

I decided to use Bordeaux because its developers (or developer singular ... I'm not sure) promised that IrfanView 4.25 would run with it.

And I saw plenty of Wine users have trouble with Irfanview. Codeweavers, who I'd rather deal with than Bordeaux, doesn't make any promises in regard to Irfanview. Bordeaux does.

Why Irfanview? It's the best photo editor on any platform for my particular workflow at the L.A. Daily News. It's quick, batches well and lets me get to every part of the IPTC metadata I need to edit.

So getting it in Linux — in my case Debian Lenny — is a huge win.

I had problems but by sheer luck (Bordeaux's lack of documentation is astounding for something I paid actual money for) I was easily able to install Bordeaux and then use it to install IrfanView. It's almost too easy.

Getting the IrfanView plugins installed was another matter.

After the Bordeaux install, none of the Wine tools worked — either from the Bordeaux GUI or on the Linux command line.

I don't know how I thought of this (it's a bit above my FOSS geek-level pay grade), but I came up with the idea that I should install Debian's Wine packages over those installed by Bordeaux.

That did it. I could now use Bordeaux's tools to "run" Wine and all of its utilities. I was then able to install the IrfanView plugins from the .exe file I had previously downloaded from the IrfanView site.

I even found a PNG logo for IrfanView with which I added the app to my upper GNOME panel. (And yes, I'll be sending some cash along to IrfanView developer Irfan Skiljan very soon.)

What's the takeaway?

If you're running Debian Lenny, first install Bordeaux, then use Synaptic (or your favorite package-managing tool) to install Debian's own Wine package and dependencies.

I have a feeling that the Wine included in Bordeaux 2.0.0, which is Wine 1.1.36, doesn't work perfectly (or all that well) in Debian Lenny because it's too "new."

Lenny installs Wine 1.0.1-1. Thus far, I can say that with the Lenny Wine, everything works like it's supposed to.

I don't really have any other Windows apps I'm dying to run. Bordeaux offers easy GUI installs of the IE 6 and 7 browsers, a bunch of MS Office programs as well as a few versions of Photoshop up to CS2, I think (I imagine you need either a bona fide Photoshop disc or a product code) as well as the Steam gaming engine (barely know what that is, to tell you the truth). I really don't need any of that stuff.

But having IrfanView in Debian is a huge, huge win for my personal workflow.

When you order Bordeaux from the Web site, it looks like you're ordering a physical DVD. Not true. You get the ability to download the Bordeaux package in a variety of 32- and 64-bit formats, including .deb and .rpm packages. No DVD.

I expected some detailed documentation for my $20. Didn't get it. It would have been nice for the Bordeaux "Group" to inform me of its Wine's incompatibility with Debian Lenny. A forum would be nice. I seem to remember one being on the company's site, but I couldn't find it yesterday.

I can't complain too much: The Windows app I intended to run in Linux is running — and well.

For those with Intel-equipped Macs, you can run Internet Explorer with Wine in much the same method as Linux users do.

A guy named Mike Kronenberg made this possible. The process involves installing X11 and Darwine. I haven't tried this (all I've got is a G4 Mac), but it's worth exploring if, for some reason, you need a version of IE past the final one that Microsoft released for the Mac (5.2 or something of that sort). I'd love to see this for PowerPC, but I'm not optimistic.

The Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy install on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) performed admirably for its first few months, but after a couple weeks of inactivity I had trouble during a software update. Everything slowed to a crawl. Apt and Aptitude worked, but any other kind of package management (Add/Del Programs, Synaptic) slowed the system to point that the only way to regain control was a hard reset.

So I reinstalled Gutsy from scratch. Gone was the Feisty-era kernel that expertly managed the $0 Laptop's CPU fan, and this install started exhibiting the same sludgy symptoms almost immediately.

Did a recent update break Gutsy?

I found no evidence to support this from the Ubuntu forums, nor anywhere else.

But I wanted to install wine and Internet Explorer the easy way, and even that wasn't working in Gutsy.

Then I broke my vow to stop dual- and triple-booting and put Slackware 12 in my last available partition. I purposefully installed LILO, and could boot Slackware from the $0 Laptop for the first time. And while I got X working with the frame-buffer version of xorg.conf, resolution was way less than optimal. It was probably running at 16 colors. Still, Slackware -- even in KDE -- was very, very fast. Had I been able to get X right, I would've been tempted to turn the entire laptop over to Slackware.

I tried every xorg.conf that Slackware had in /etc/X11. I tried both the whole file plus the monitor portions of xorg.conf files from Ubuntu 7.10, Debian 4.0 and Puppy 3.00. Nope.

Then it was time to reinstall Ubuntu. I did the only reasonable thing. I put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty in the No. 1 slot. That brought back GRUB, and I was able to boot Ubuntu -- running fine now -- and Debian. But the GRUB entries for Slackware? None of them work. Kernel panic on all. Then I replaced references to sda with hda. Two got farther than that, but I was left with blank screens and no login prompt. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to set GRUB to successfully boot Slackware 12.

Here's what I had:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

Next thing I'll try: adding initrd lines to see if that gets it going.

I'm not ready to give up on Slackware via GRUB yet, but does it have to be so damn hard?

Here's the deal. We've got a Mac at home ... and my two Linux-equipped laptops. This Old PC in the Back Room has no Internet connectivity at present. And the university where Ilene teaches changed their online administrative portal from one that works in Firefox to one that ... does not. It requires Internet Explorer, version 5.5 or greater. That even leaves out the last version of IE that Microsoft deigned to produce for Mac's OS X.

I returned to the easiest way to get Internet Explorer (and the Wine tools required to run it and many other Windows apps). That would be IEs4Linux.

By following the Ubuntu-specific instructions, I was able to get wine, cabextract and all the relevant files to install IE 5.5 and IE 6 on my Gutsy setup. Yep, Gusty is still giving me trouble with any package-management program that isn't apt or Aptitude, but since I have those two at my disposal still, I'm sticking with this install for awhile.

Anyway, even though the process involves changing the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list, then downloading, unpacking and installing from a tarball, it's all laid out. My advice: go to the page and use copy and past to get the exact code into your terminal window.

There are also distro-specific instructions for: Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS.

In short, if you need IE, this works. And you now have Wine, with which you can experiment with other Windows apps on your Linux box. It's trial and error (mostly error) in my limited experience; for heavy duty use of Wine, I recommend Code Weavers, which costs money but is probably well worth it.

As I've previously written, my first "experiment" will be getting IrfanView running under Linux. Sadly, there is nothing -- NOTHING -- on Linux to equal IrfanView when it comes to image editing -- or at least the kind of image editing I do.