[Wine] Re: Booting from a flash and need to install wine

[SpawnHappyJake]

Hi BigT!

    I recommend going to terminal, typing "sudo add-apt-repository ppa://ubuntu-wine/ppa" hitting enter, then "sudo apt-get update" (enter) then when that's done, "sudo apt-get install wine1.3" (enter) and then "sudo apt-get update" again. Then close that terminal and open a new one. Do a "wine --verision" to make sure you have an up-to-date WINE. One version behind or the latest is usually acceptable. If you always want the latest, you will need to compile the latest from source as it comes out, an "involved" process, as I like to say.

    Recently I did the above, but didn't close the terminal and open a new one. "wine --version" gave me an error saying that wine couldn't find "--version" or something like that. I closed the terminal and opened a new one, did "wine --version" again, and I got "1.3.23".

    Did you say that you are booting Ubuntu from a flash drive and want WINE in that? Because if so, I'm tickled pink. Making things bootable into a bunch of random stuff is one of my hobbies!
    In fact, currently I am working on an "ultimate bootable thumb drive". It has two partitions, one for Linux Mint 32-bit and one for Linux Mint 64-bit. They are "live" installers that somehow wound up sharing the same persistence file or something like that.
    Accessible from both sides is WINE 1.3.22, I believe is the version, and you can run (through WINE) the MiTec Windows Registry Recovery for a GUI to assist with, say, chntpw. The MiTec program only lets you view the registry, but has a GUI. Chntpw lets you edit the registry, but has no GUI. It's a great combo! OpenRegEdit will replace that, though, once I get smart enough to know how to download something through cvs. 
    You did not specify HOW Ubuntu is on the flash drive. You might very well know all this stuff already, but I have to ask to make sure.
    Did you ACTUALLY install Ubuntu to it? As in you went through the normal Ubuntu install wizard (same one used to install to an internal hard drive to put Linux on a computer locally) and selected a partition on your thumb drive as the partition to install to and told it to put the bootloader on the thumb drive? If so, undo that NOW before you burn out your thumb drive. Those flash cells can't handle constantly being written to. And you'll really burn it out fast if you have a swap partition on on your thumb drive. If you just copied the files off a Ubuntu install disk (or iso) to the thumb drive, installed a bootloader to your thumb dive, and made a bootloader entry to boot Ubuntu off the thumb drive, then it will be a "live" installation environment when you boot into that, mounted from a compressed filesystem and none of your changes will be saved back to the disk (such as installing WINE). This keeps the cells from being written to too much.
    What you want is to use a persistence file. You use usb-creator-gtk (called "Startup Disk Creator" in the Ubuntu main menu) to make a thumb drive bootable into a Ubuntu installer live environment like off a CD/DVD, but you have usb-creator-gtk make a persistence file and add the magic kernel parameter of "try-usb" to the bootloader entry. If you are in Windows and want to make such a Ubuntu thumb drive, then you can download a version of usb-creator for Windows here: http://hacktolive.org/files/usb-creator.exe
    Now when you boot into THAT, and you do ANY changes, such as making a new folder or changing the desktop background or install a program (like WINE!) or put some blank Libre docs in your templates folder or assign shortcut keys or anything, those changes don't actually get written immediately to the disk. They are held temporarily somewhere (I guess RAM, but when you run out of that, where do they go? I don't know.), and get written back to the disk (the flash drive) via this persistence file when you shutdown. That's why it takes so long for it to shutdown; it has to write these changes to the disk. So don't cut the power after telling it to shutdown thinking it got stuck. Give it time or else you might lose all or some of what you have done.
    You set the limit of how much space you will allow for saving changes in the usb-creator-gtk program. 1.5 gigs is working swell for me. Don't expect to game through WINE off a persistence thumb drive, but you can get some good recovery/ troubleshooting/ maintenance tools on there for sure!

     Personally, I'd recommend replacing the Syslinux bootloader that usb-creator puts on the thumb drive with GRUB2. In fact, I've used usb-creator-gtk to create bootable thumb drives with a persistence file before and they weren't bootable. I installed GRUB2 and made a grub.cfg file, put on a font file and a GRUB menu background and set that all up in grub.cfg, and it works! In fact, I can pick want I want to boot into from the menu, and I have a beautiful background image of the C&H sugar refinery that I took as I went over the Golden Gate bridge!
     The details of how to install GRUB2 and whatnot are out bounds (I was already pushing them) for the WINE forum. If you want to talk about this elsewhere, I'd love to. You can PM me a link to were you want to fire up the conversation, if you chose to.

Cheers,
Jake