[Wine] This could be a multiple supplier problem

[A Nonny Moose]

I have finally encountered this problem in such a way that everything went awry.

Running Simcity 4 Rush Hour with the following command line:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" wine C:\\PROG\~FBU\\Maxis\\SIMC\~ZMW\\Apps\\SimCity\ 4.exe -intro:off

Which brought up the game, just fine.

I opened my largest city, and very soon after that, while I was adding something to the layout, the graphics went totally mad.  I started getting blocks of four colours (RBGK) everywhere.  So I did a save and quit to region.  The region map was a mash of colours, mostly red.  So I quit the game.

At this point, I noticed that my upper panel was different.  Its style had reverted to some kind of default, and the icons were different, and the background was not of the theme I was using.  I had originally reset to use metacity to reduce the graphics load.

The O/S is UBUNTU 10.04 with current updates and wine 1.2 (just released).

So, I did a restart.  When the system reloaded and I logged on, I found that my ethernet link icon on the panel had been corrupted??  I stooged around a bit, but found nothing.  So a did another boot.  At this point, I got everything back to normal.

I am now in a quandary.  Could this be a wine problem, or a Linux problem.  Its easy to point fingers, but that's not the way to get the solution.  So, I am starting here.

Simcity 4 is a legacy program written (released) in 2002.  It knows nothing from modern paging techniques, etc.  It fails if you have any special graphics funtions turned on in your GPU.  It doesn't even understand anti-aliasing.  Multiple processors kill it, and it crashes to the desktop.  If there is any kind of memory or virtual memory hiccup, it crashes to the desktop.

I have run this program for many years on XP and had nothing happen like this.  The interesting thing is that the operating system did not protect itself and was stepped on.  To really get a handle on this, I need someone who has an intimate knowledge of how memory management is done in Linux and what, if anything, wine does to make its programs work correctly.

Help!

John Winterton, CCP (retired).