[Wine] Can I use a static build to install on an obsolete target?

[Paul Jackson]

thestar at fussycoder.id.au wrote:
> I wonder if you could compile an alternate set of libraries, or even an
> alternate install of redhat (or debian), and run that alternate system
> inside a chroot.
> 
> Naturally, any daemons or services shouldn't be run from that chroot to
> maintain your "original" system, but it should be enough for wine.
> 
>> Paul wrote:
>>> I need to run Wine on RedHat 7.2 (which dates from
>>> about 2001, kernel 2.4.7). The wine that shipped on 7.2 is pretty much
>>> unusable
>> You're probably pretty much screwed.   Best you can do is disable all
>> the external dependencies that you can (e.g. opengl),
>> install the others from source (e.g. fontforge).
>> You may find you need a recent X server to get good fonts;
>> are you able to install that from source?
>> - Dan

I got as far as ignoring FontForge, disabling Freetype in sfnt2fnt.c 
(configure and the source code disagree on what's in Freetype), and 
modding configure.ac to disable OpenGL. At this point I got failures in 
xrender.c, and I figured that if X11 wasn't going to work, then I should 
give up.

I haven't really thought about the chroot option. I don't need graphics 
in this app, and I'm knocking up some RPC/sockets code at the moment to 
communicate with a Windows box.

There's a slightly amusing irony in all this. I've written a large and 
very non-trivial program (but with no graphics) on Linux, dynamically 
linked. At this point I realised that I couldn't afford to support a 
dynamic app, so I produced various statically-linked versions (3 
binaries should cover almost all Windows and Linux usage). If it still 
runs on an original RH7.2, I thought, it'll run on anything. But, of 
course, I need this Windows app to test it, and it turns out that the 
Wine world-view is not quite the same as my own...

:)

- Paul