Suggestions for a Working WINE Installation

[Jason Voegele]

Hello fellow Wine users.

Taking a look at the screenshots on winehq.com and seeing people who 
have Internet Explorer and Office 2000 and various games running under 
Linux has gotten me quite jealous. :-)

I've been trying to do these things myself, thus far without any 
success, and I'm hoping one of you lucky ones can help me find my way 
Windows/Linux integration.

Here's my situation.  I've got a dual-boot system with both Libranet 
(Debian) GNU/Linux and Windows 2000 installed and working.  I installed 
Wine "stand-alone" without pointing it to the NTFS partition where Win2K 
is installed, because I've read that Wine doesn't deal well with using 
Win2K (and other NT based systems) as a basis.  Using this setup, I'm 
able to get basic things like Notepad and WinZip to run under Linux, but 
attempts to install various things like Internet Explorer, Office 97 or 
2000, or EditPlus (my favorite text editor) have failed miserably.

So reading through winehq.com, and discovering the possibility of using 
native DLLs, I decided to try to use some Windows 98 DLLs in place of 
the built-in Wine versions.  Now, I don't actually have Windows 98 
installed on my machine, so I copied the following files from a Windows 
98 machine I have access to at work:

COMMCTRL.DLL, COMCTL32.DLL
COMMDLG.DLL, COMDLG32.DLL
CRTDLL.DLL, MSVCRT.DLL
MSVIDEO.DLL, MSVFW32.DLL
SHELL.DLL, SHELL32.DLL
REGEDIT.EXE, WINHELP.EXE, WINHELP32.EXE

I copied these files to my Wine version of C:\Windows\System (except the 
*.exe files, which I put in C:\Windows), and then used the DllOverides 
section of the Wine config file to tell Wine to use the native versions 
of the above files.

This didn't really seem to change the situation at all, since I still am 
unable to install IE or Office.  I used the directions at 
frankscorner.org to attempt to install IE5.5, and simply used the Office 
setup.exe to try to install Office.

Now, I'm not really asking you to solve my specific problems, but what I 
would like to know is, for all of you people who've been successful 
installing and running these things, what is your setup, and how did you 
go about doing it?

Thanks for your help and patience.

-- 
Jason Voegele
"There is an essential core at the center of each man and woman that
remains unaltered no matter how life's externals may be transformed
or recombined. But it's smaller than we think."
     -- Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun