On 8/15/07, Scott Paul Robertson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 02:23:32PM -0700, Bryan Murdock wrote:
> > > Have you tried wine out for these programs yet? I can run the latest
> > > version of Picasa (not the Google distributed version) under wine and
> > > it works great!
> >
> > I haven't tried lately (as in, the last 2 years or so).  Wine has
> > always been such a pain, sometimes working, and sometimes not.  The
> > little CD-ROM games were especially difficult to get working.  Has it
> > gotten any better?
> >
>
> I've had pretty decent success with wine with very minimal
> configuration. Simcity 2000 installs and plays under it just fine.

OK, I tried wine.  It was the simplest to try, and I figured it would
fail quickly and I could move on to virtualbox or vmplayer.  I was
wrong.  Um, well, on the second part.  Right on the first, wrong on
the second.  Anyway...to set it up I did:

sudo aptitude install wine

I tested it on a little executable that I got from my sisters wedding
photographer.  After some initial wine configuration stuff (I accepted
all the defaults), the slide show played (complete with cheesy
"wedding" music).  Cool.

Then I popped in the first CD-ROM game that my kiddos have (JumpStart
Toddlers, if you must know).  A billion dialogs popped up asking if I
wanted to browse the files or play the music on the CD.  After
dismissing all those I saw a dialog asking if I wanted to permit the
autorun to execute.  Spooky.  I clicked OK and the game started right
up.  Very spooky.

Next CD (Blues Clue's Backyard Fair).  No offer of autorun, but I
found the BluesCluesBackYardFair.exe in the nautilus window that
popped up and double clicked it.  I think it asked me what application
to use and I told it 'wine' and off it went.  This game actually
wanted to install itself.  Dubious, I clicked OK and the windoze
installer popped up and started to run.  This was getting really
weird.  It froze.  I tried again, and it worked.  After the
installation (into some mysterious C:\Program Files location*) the
game played.  Wow.

I tried another game (don't remember what it was), that also wanted to
be installed.  No hang this time, it worked.    A couple others were
the same, but then one of them tried to install quicktime.  I think I
had to reboot to get out of that mess.  The more I thought about it,
that game never worked on windoze either.

Overall, I'm very impressed with wine.  I don't think a normal person
would have persisted through the extra dialogs and occasional hangs,
but for me it wasn't too bad (did I just say I'm not normal?).  Now
that it's all set up, I think my wife and kiddos will be fine with it
for their cheesy CD-ROM games.  Thanks for the recommendation!

Bryan

* I did find the ~/.wine/drive_c directory before too long.  It still
creeps me out though.  I know it should be safe, but seeing my
beautiful Linux machine popping up dialogs about autorun and allowing
stuff to install into C:\Program Files...it just feels so dirty.
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