[Wine] Re: Never had an app work in WINE

[CasperTFG]

Hardware
CPU:  Athalon 64 X2 6000
MB:  Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 570 SLI MCP chipset)
Video:  EVGA 640-P2-N829 GeForce 8800GTS
RAM:  2GB Mushkin Blackline DDR2-800

Software
Kubuntu 8.10 (fully updated)
WINE 1.1.38
nvidia-kernel-common 20051028
nvidia-glx-new 169.12+2.6.24.18-27.5

WINE Settings
 Graphics: 
Allow DirectX apps to stop the mouse from leaving their window
Allow the window manager to decorate the windows
Allow the window manager to control the windows
Hardware Vertex Shader
Allow Pixel Shader

Audio:  
ALSA Driver
Full Hardware Acceleration



Installed Thief2 as a normal user via a terminal window:    wine setup.exe

Installed without a problem.  After successful installation, trying to run the program via WINE Configuration I get an error window that says:  
DirectX version 7 or higher is not installed.
Please install DirectX 7 before playing.  DirectX 7 installer
can be accessed through the autoplay dialog.

Running from a terminal: 
wine Thief2.exe
err:alsa:ALSA_CheckSetVolume Could not find 'PCM Playback Volume' element
err:alsa:ALSA_CheckSetVolume Could not find 'PCM Playback Volume' element
fixme:mixer:ALSA_MixerInit No master control found on CA0106, disabling mixer

and the same error window pops up as described above.  The audio errors can be ignored for now because they are a moot point if the app won't run.

Using this hardware and software configuration has got me to this point, and this is the furthest I have ever gotten with any app or hardware configuration.  There is nothing in the WINE user manual that addresses this type of error, and everything I have read in the forums has advised against installing any version of DirectX in Linux, and also says that that WINE should support DirectX 9, which supports 8 and 7.

I really hope this doesn't sound snotty at this point, but following the WINE documentation and established procedures where should someone look next?

I also hope that everyone understands that this is not my only problem using WINE.  It just represents the furthest I've ever got with anything using WINE.