Various problems- it just gets worse!

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

Hi all,

  I first tried using Wine a couple of years back, but I've not had much
use for it (I normally just use Linux and Linux programs), and the version
then wasn't too good.
  I went to upgrade to the current Debian package, but it had dependencies
I didn't want to install (like libarts), so I decided to compile it from
source instead (besides, Debian's version is over a year old!).

  (What follows is an epic tale of diminishing success, possibly ending
with me hurling my whole machine out of the window in frustration if
noone can give me some useful answers.)

  Got it, compiled, and eventually, it finished. Then did a make install
(as root, of course). Copied the config file from the samples directory
after it complained the first time (didn't see that info at first).
Set up a windows directory on my filesystem (I don't have real windows
on this machine).

 Finally, tried installing Total Annihilation. The installer ran quite
happily, but at the end complained it couldn't find the readme.txt file,
even though it was there. So I figured maybe Wine wasn't too good at
dealing with Linux's case sensitivity. I ignored it, and tries running
the game, as it had now been installed in the windows directory.

 Hooray! Total Annihilation's FMV sequence starts up, fullscreen.
It isn't too jerky, and the sound isn't too bad. Get to the menu screen,
and it tells me I should have installed the version of DirectX that
came with the CD. I figured that Wine should prolly only be used with
its own version of DirectX, so I ignored this.

 Started the game. Noticed that the sound wasn't working now (even though
I had volume turned up), and I noticed by now that the mouse hadn't been
grabbed, so I could move it away from the TA window (which had displayed
like a fullscreen prog). This was annoying, especially the mouse issue,
as TA's screen scrolls when the cursor is at the edges of the screen.
The edge of Linux's virtual screen stops the mouse at the top and the
left, so if it goes that way, TA notices and scrolls. Nothing stops the
mouse going past the right or bottom edges, so it almost never scrolls
that way. This makes playing pretty difficult!

 I finished playing after a while, but then decided to fix everything.
Read some more documentation. It's all over the place! I then found
the bit about copying across the sample system.ini and win.ini files.
I realised that something earlier had already put *something* into
win.ini, which it must have created. So I decided to delete all of
the stuff I'd put in the windows directory, and restarted, copying the
system.ini and win.ini files. I figured they'd have some important
stuff that might make things work better.

  IIRC it was around this time that it occurred to me that I'd got
some old files in ~/.wine from a previous version. I deleted everything
in there except for config. I then tried reinstalling Total Annihilation
again, and then tried playing it again.

  And what did I find? The sound hadn't got any better, the mouse still
wasn't being grabbed, but now, I couldn't get it to take keyboard input!!!
I tried this LOTS of times. It's gone.

 I looked through the mailing list archives. I looked through the FAQ.
I looked through the HOWTOs. I looked in the documentation directory.
But it only had SGML files in it! Somewhere I found mention of "winecheck"
or something. I ran that. There were some minor complaints, but then
it said "CRITICAL" about the registry:

 It said that winedefault.reg didn't seem to have been applied using
regedit.

 Well no, it never told me to.

No mention about what to do about this. Scanned through the documentation
directory, found registry.sgml, and read it through less. Tried what it
said about regedit winedefault.reg.
Sounds simple enough! Tried it (using appropriate paths). It mumbled
about my FDD (as wine does each time I use it), sat there for a couple
of seconds, and then finished without any more info.

 Tried everything again. Still no better. Tried to find where it had
put the registry. Couldn't find it. According to winecheck, it still
wasn't there.

 Then found the bit about "wineinstall", how it normally sets up the
registry. But this also compiles everything! I've already done
that, I don't want to do it all again! Who the hell would find the
information about running wineinstall, that couldn't run configure
and make for themselves? It isn't rocket science. I looked to see
how it used regedit. Didn't seem to be any different to what I'd been
doing.

 So, I've spent the past few hours trying to bludgeon wine and
regedit into either installing that registry the way it is supposed to,
or recognising me copying it by hand to whatever location, etc etc.
I've tried setting debug messages in regedit and wine, to see if it
can say that it's not finding some file, IT IS NOT WORKING.

 I am not the sort of person who says "Help me, I am a newbie, I
don't understand linux, please hold my hand and tell me how to
do everything because I don't want to read instructions". But I've
really had it with this. I was really impressed to find myself running
Windows games under Linux, and thinking "This Wine is pretty cool",
but now I just think "Why can't they either make this stupid thing
work, or document it properly, or have it tell you what's going wrong?"

  Somebody tell me something I can use here, please. Like what regedit
is actually supposed to do when it works. Or anything else.

 Tom Barnes-Lawrence