[Wine] Re: Solitaire Master 5

[motub]

nevek wrote:
> I am a complete Linux newbie and am trying to use Wine to run the eGames set of card games Solitaire Master 5 with Ubuntu 8.X OS.  I installed the version of wine that was available with the add/remove programs application.

In an effort to help I downloaded and installed the trial version of Solitaire Master 3 (all I could find on eGames) on my system (Linux Mint 9, compatible with Ubuntu 10.04). I am running the current version of Wine (1.2-rc5).

There are a number of differences between my test and your system.
You are running a much older version of Wine than I am. I know what version of Wine was in my repository when I installed LM 7 Gloria which was based on Ubuntu 9.04, and even that was old and outdated compared to the then-current development version so I expect that you may not even be running the last stable release, much less anything approaching the current version. Naturally the functionality of your version of wine is substantially different (and in most cases much reduced) than the functionality of mine. For the exact version number of your Wine, open a terminal application and type wine --version and hit Enter to see the result and post that result here.

You are running a much older version of Ubuntu than I am. Ubuntu 8.04 was released over two years ago; Ubuntu 8.10 was released almost two years ago. The functionality of these two versions-- and thus the functionality of Wine on these systems-- is more than likely much different than on my system. Linux, Ubuntu, and especially Wine, have come a long way in two years. 

Furthermore, if you are using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), that LTS (Long Term Support) release is now beyond its end of life (EOL)--  LTS releases are for two years. The current LTS release is 10.04. The bad news in terms of Wine is that, since Hardy Heron (and Intrepid Ibex, version 8.10) are both outdated, there are no Wine packages for the current development version, and indeed no pre-compiled packages available for quite a long time now (the last I could find in the archive is 1.1.38, which is probably far better than whatever you have, but far less than the current 1.2-rc6 released yesterday). So at this point, to upgrade to the current version of Wine, you'd have to compile it yourself, which may or may not be possible under Ubuntu 8, and is likely an overwhelming enterprise for a linux "dummy" under the best of conditions, which these are not. 

I am testing an older version of the application than what you have, and further mine is a trial version whereas you have the full application. Solitaire Master seems to have come a fair distance in the intervening versions-- I don't, for example, have a gamebutler.exe in my test installation, nor do I have any *.dxr files. A quick search indicates that *.dxr files are Adobe Director files, so I'd guess that gamebutler.exe has some spiffy opening animated sequence that I don't have available. So any advice as to how to overcome that is to some extent guesswork, expecially under the conditions you're working with (old Wine, old OS). But further searching indicates that *.dxr files can be opened by the Shockwave player, which is available via winetricks, so there is hope on that front, as long as shockwave can successfully install and run on your likely ancient Wine.
Those caveats aside (not that they're easily pushed aside, but I did do the test), my results were that I was successfully able to run the trial version of Solitaire Master 3, but I had to install IE6 and support applications (as listed in the 'Lower Performance' install section of the AppDB listing for Steam (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=1554)). Prior to installing IE6, the application installed, but on run opened a notepad? wordpad? html document that was apparently the code for the "Play Trial/Buy Full Version" splash screen. The fact that it was html was what inspired me to install ie6, after which the trial ran fine. 

I would imagine that the blank screen you're getting is essentially the same thing, except in your case it's trying to run  the *.dxr animation, but can't, because Shockwave Player isn't installed.

Under normal circumstances, I would advise you first to update Wine to the current development version, then install Shockwave (and possibly IE6, just to be sure) via Winetricks (http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks). However, due to your outdated version of Ubuntu (no offence, it's the technical term for an application beyond end of life), you don't have the possibliity to update to the current development version unless you want to compile it (which is a possibility, of course-- this is Linux, after all; you always have the ability to "roll your own"), and updating to the "most recent available binary" for your system is of only limited usefulness. It may be, though, that even the limited usefulness of updating to, say Wine 1.1.37 over what you now have, is sufficient to make it worthwhile, if you don't want to compile the current development version, or upgrade Ubuntu so that you can upgrade without compiling.

In any case, you would want to download Winetricks from the link above (another minor benefit of upgrading Ubuntu, above all of the major benefits, would be that winetricks is in the repository, rather than you having to download it yourself), then run the script and choose shockwave. Allow it to install and see if the application then runs (since I think that the problem is that the app is falling over the splash screen, and therefore never gets to the main app wherein you might have the ability to turn the splash screen off ;) ). If it does then work, I would suggest making an entry in the AppDB (http://appdb.winehq.org/) (Application Database), because there's nothing for Solitaire Master there at all, and maybe someone else will want to know how/if it runs.

Hope this helps,
Holly