[Wine] Three simple problems with wine under SuSe 9.3

[Holly Bostick]

G4BBH at Winlink.org schreef:
> I have three problems with wine. Wine set up a pseudo windows 
> directory system under my home directory/wine.  My application 
> resides in the created 'Program Files' directory and a necessary file
>  placed in the windows/system directory.
> 
> 1.  If I click on the exe and run with wine it works without error. 
> However I seem unable to set up a path to the exe as in 'wine 
> "drive_c/Program Files/Airmail/Airmail3.exe"' as the executive can 
> never be found.  I tried all sorts of path combinations and failed.

Many Windows applications will behave this way when you are not in the
installation directory when attempting to run the application. I do not
consider this so much an error in Wine as an obstacle of the environment.

The solution?

If you encounter such a program (notable because they run fine when the
*.exe is started from a term or file manager from within the
application's install directory, but does not start at all when the
*.exe is attempted to run from any other directory using the path), and
you need/want a desktop icon/panel entry/keybinding-- start the program
from a (bash) script instead. It takes two lines in any text editor, as
follows

#!/bin/sh (required for a bash script to identify it as a script)
cd /path/to/application/directory
wine application.exe

If you then name the script "application.sh" and make it executable, you
can then do the following:

1) make a desktop icon with the target 'application.sh'
2) make a menu/panel entry with the target 'application.sh'
3) copy or symlink application.sh to /usr/bin and run it like any other
command.


> 
> 2.  My application starts with all the wrong fonts.  I copied over a
>  basic set of Windows fonts to my pseudo windows/fonts directory and
>  it is much better now.  Are there limitations to using those fonts?

In what respect? I strongly doubt it, in any respect.

> 
> 3.  And the most seriously prom: my application required to talk to 
> radio equipment and a special modem via com ports.Even if I select 
> com1 it comes back and says it is already in use (it isn't).  If I 
> run wine as super user then com1 works but I lose some default paths
>  and end up losing my fonts and the application can't find a file in
>  windows/system.  The dos devices directory shows com1 as a link to 
> ttyS1.  I suspect I need to change permissions.  All my other com 
> ports are actually on a USB hub. How can I set up at at least 3 com 
> ports (radio, gps and modem each require a com port with standard 
> handshaking).  Do I set up (say) com5 as a link to the first USB port
>  device?

This appears to be a permissions problem.Your com ports are only
available to root, and Wine is not intended to be run by root (and in
fact should not be run by root). On my system, /dev/ttyS1 is a symlink
to /dev/tts/1 which is owned by root and the tty group. Is your user a
member of all such groups that might own the serial ports (tty, serial,
com, dialup or dialout, etc)?

Please check this (easiest would be to look in /dev and see what group
exactly owns the ports and add yourself to it), and after doing so,
remove (delete, rm -rf) the /.wine directory in /root (root's HOME
folder), as root having a Wine configuration will mess up your user
configuration, then try your program again.

Hope this helps,
Holly