Newbie questions

[billv]

Howdy;

I'm using Kubuntu 12.04, and have wine-1.6.1, and I've noted that the
latest version of wine seems to be several versions above that. Will
the latest wine work for me?

Also, IE seems to be quite slow, but doesn't tell me what version of IE
it is. If available, I could use IE-8. The current version pukes when I
direct it to amazon.com, which wants the latest firefox, edge, or IE-8.

Thanks in advance

Bill Vance

[dimesio]

AFAIK there are no packages of the development release for 12.04. You would have to build it yourself, and I'm not sure it would even compile on that old version. But if you want to try, the instructions are here: http://wiki.winehq.org/BuildingWine. If your system is 64 bit, follow the instructions in either the Containers or the Chroots section.

As for IE, Wine's builtin replacement is actually based on gecko; if you had the latest version of Wine, you would also have a newer version of gecko. But you shouldn't be using it for browsing anyway; it's included for apps that need html rendering. If you're just browsing Amazon, any native browser will do.

[billv]

AFAIK there are no packages of the development release for 12.04. You would have to build it yourself, and I'm not sure it would even compile on that old version. But if you want to try, the instructions are here: http://wiki.winehq.org/BuildingWine. If your system is 64 bit, follow the instructions in either the Containers or the Chroots section.

As for IE, Wine's builtin replacement is actually based on gecko; if you had the latest version of Wine, you would also have a newer version of gecko. But you shouldn't be using it for browsing anyway; it's included for apps that need html rendering. If you're just browsing Amazon, any native browser will do.

My system is 64bit. As for wines version of, "IE", What I was doing could only be considered, "browsing" in that it tossed in its chips before I could get it to navigate to the Prime TV/movie page. It didn't seem to like comcasts equivalent either. TV/movie viewing is the main reason I'm looking into wine, as there are flash/streaming issues on linux, and pipelight doesn't seem to be functional in this area. Especially as amazon's TV/movie page no longer recognizes firefox 42.0 as being firefox. Fun stuff.

[dimesio]

Flash doesn't work with wine-gecko:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32946
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32772

You could try installing Windows Firefox and Flash in Wine.

[billv]

Flash doesn't work with wine-gecko:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32946
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32772

You could try installing Windows Firefox and Flash in Wine.

Would that be one of the versions of firefox/flash available here, or
would I have to get them elsewhere? If so, where, and what is the
proper procedure for installing them in wine? I seem to be having
trouble getting past the, "c:", portion of the path.

Bill

[dimesio]

Would that be one of the versions of firefox/flash available here, or
would I have to get them elsewhere?

There are no versions available "here"; WineHQ does not distribute Firefox, Flash, or any other third party software. You have to download and install them from their respective sites, the same way you would on Windows.

If so, where, and what is the
proper procedure for installing them in wine? I seem to be having
trouble getting past the, "c:", portion of the path.

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#run_from_terminal

[billv]

Would that be one of the versions of firefox/flash available here, or
would I have to get them elsewhere?

There are no versions available "here"; WineHQ does not distribute Firefox, Flash, or any other third party software. You have to download and install them from their respective sites, the same way you would on Windows.

Apparently it's been a while since you last checked the appdb section. It took me a
while to find the right search window, type, "firefox", and then scroll down a little
to find it, but there was a list of firefox versions, with their good/bad points, and
a clickable link to get a down load. I tried for version 39, and got 42 instead. I still
don't know what to do with it, as there are no, "README", "INSTALL", "man", or
similar files. There is a, "run-mozilla.sh", file, but it seems to have nothing to do
with wine in it. I looked at the FAQ, but in the archive there are no *.exe files to
run.

If so, where, and what is the
proper procedure for installing them in wine? I seem to be having
trouble getting past the, "c:", portion of the path.

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#run_from_terminal[/quote]

Trying to get past the, "c:", part of the path with, "ls", or, "cd", etc., just gets me,
"no such file or directory", errors. Not the only part to do that, but I figure if
there's a way around that, it should work for the others, too. Midnight Commander
seems to deal with it, but doesn't tell me how to do that for anything else.

[dimesio]

Apparently it's been a while since you last checked the appdb section. It took me a
while to find the right search window, type, "firefox", and then scroll down a little
to find it, but there was a list of firefox versions, with their good/bad points, and
a clickable link to get a down load.

Apparently you didn't notice that those links lead to mozilla.org.

I looked at the FAQ, but in the archive there are no *.exe files to
run.

Sounds like you downloaded the Linux version. You need to download the Windows version. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

Trying to get past the, "c:", part of the path with, "ls", or, "cd", etc., just gets me,
"no such file or directory", errors.

Sounds like you neglected to encase the path in quotes.

[billv]

I looked at the FAQ, but in the archive there are no *.exe files to
run.

Sounds like you downloaded the Linux version. You need to download the Windows version. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

I have since looked at the list in winetricks, found firefox, and flash, but neither seems to be completely functional. While firefox can save pages to the filesystem, it can't access the file system. Attempting to use the, "file:///oopsie.html/", construct, just gives a bad address error.

Flash, on the other hand, is completely non-functioning. Both programs appear to be suffering from unavailable dependencies. Are their lists of what they require, here or elsewhere?

That was yesterdays summery. I had used the partially working wine version of firefox, and it didn't display the OS when the mouse pointer passed over it, so I had inadvertantly downloaded the 64 bit, (linux), version. Error corrected. Downloaded the flash player .exe file, and both seem to have, ".exe'd", correctly.

Firefox is now recognized as firefox, but still won't access the file system. Instead of streaming the video, it apparently wants to download it, (I think into memory), and bombs after a few minutes. Otherwise, it's doing nothing at all but waiting a few minutes, I can't tell, but it says, "downloading".

Trying to get past the, "c:", part of the path with, "ls", or, "cd", etc., just gets me,
"no such file or directory", errors.

Sounds like you neglected to encase the path in quotes.

Nope, didn't work then, does work now, have no idea why. Possibly the recent re-boot fixed something on that terminal.

[dimesio]

I installed Firefox 39 using winetricks and manually installed Flash 19, using Wine 1.7.54.

Browsing the filesystem with file:// works fine so long as a Windows-style path is used. Unix-style paths don't work.

I tested streaming video on video.pbs.org, which uses non-DRM Flash. The page was very slow to load, and the player setup timed out a couple of times, forcing me to reload the page, but eventually I was able to stream video.

Streaming video on Hulu through Wine does not work for me because of the DRM, which relies on HAL, a library that has been deprecated on Linux for years. I installed a minimal libhal package from my distro (openSUSE) to get streaming in native Firefox to work, but my version of Wine was compiled without HAL support, so I can't test that. Theoretically, though, it should work.

I believe Amazon Video also uses Adobe DRM, so at the very least you will need libhal installed and Wine compiled with HAL support.

[billv]

I installed Firefox 39 using winetricks and manually installed Flash 19, using Wine 1.7.54.

I've been trying to duplicate that. I wound up with firefox 42. Went to comcast TV, was told I didn't have flash, and used the offered flashplayer19_ha_install.exe download. One of the inumerable fixme lines says I don't have dhcp, (i do), and the installer bombs when it tries to get something over the net. Is it talking about some version of dhcp for wine?

Browsing the filesystem with file:// works fine so long as a Windows-style path is used. Unix-style paths don't work.

I'm really not getting something here, can you show me that? The format for getting a listing for /usr/sbin/ or some such?

I tested streaming video on video.pbs.org, which uses non-DRM Flash. The page was very slow to load, and the player setup timed out a couple of times, forcing me to reload the page, but eventually I was able to stream video.

Streaming video on Hulu through Wine does not work for me because of the DRM, which relies on HAL, a library that has been deprecated on Linux for years. I installed a minimal libhal package from my distro (openSUSE) to get streaming in native Firefox to work, but my version of Wine was compiled without HAL support, so I can't test that. Theoretically, though, it should work.

I believe Amazon Video also uses Adobe DRM, so at the very least you will need libhal installed and Wine compiled with HAL support.

I have hal, libhal, etc., but I don't know about compiling wine with hal, I'm not much of a C programmer. If it takes something more complicated than --with-hal I'm probably dead in the water.

[dimesio]

Went to comcast TV, was told I didn't have flash, and used the offered flashplayer19_ha_install.exe download.

I downloaded the Flash installer from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ in native Firefox. I selected Windows7/Vista/XP/2008/2003 as the operating system and FP 19 for Firefox - NPAPI as the version. The file downloaded was named install_flash_player.exe, sha1sum 2d24ff236c99ca0b1a1ca4dea24903f0977fc6c2.

I'm really not getting something here, can you show me that? The format for getting a listing for /usr/sbin/ or some such?

Code: Select all

file://z:/usr/bin

works here. But why aren't you using your native file manager for things like that?

I have hal, libhal, etc., but I don't know about compiling wine with hal, I'm not much of a C programmer. If it takes something more complicated than --with-hal I'm probably dead in the water.

You also need the hal development files. If they are installed, ./configure should find them and use them. If they aren't, ./configure will have a warning at the end about it.

One thing I neglected to mention earlier is that I installed all this to a 32 bit wineprefix. If you haven't done that, you need to. http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#32_bit_wineprefix

And if you are still using 1.6.1, you need to upgrade. That version is over two years old and you may simply be running into bugs that have already been fixed in the development branch.

[billv]

Went to comcast TV, was told I didn't have flash, and used the offered flashplayer19_ha_install.exe download.

I downloaded the Flash installer from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ in native Firefox. I selected Windows7/Vista/XP/2008/2003 as the operating system and FP 19 for Firefox - NPAPI as the version. The file downloaded was named install_flash_player.exe, sha1sum 2d24ff236c99ca0b1a1ca4dea24903f0977fc6c2.

Ok, I've done that. The system can no longer find it's firefox with both hands. When I type, "wine firefox", I get, "wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\\system32\\firefox.exe"". In order to get it working, I have to type, "wine ".wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe". What the, "L", stands for, I have no idea.

I'm really not getting something here, can you show me that? The format for getting a listing for /usr/sbin/ or some such?

Code: Select all

file://z:/usr/bin

works here. But why aren't you using your native file manager for things like that?
[/quote]

That's hardly a, "file://z:\windows\style\path\string". Because it's not always convenient. So much so, that I rarely use it, (Dolphin file manager). Nothing wrong with it, I just find most GUI software to be too limiting, inflexible, and very much uncustomizeable, so there's no way to fix them/add features or script fixes, etc.

I have hal, libhal, etc., but I don't know about compiling wine with hal, I'm not much of a C programmer. If it takes something more complicated than --with-hal I'm probably dead in the water.

You also need the hal development files. If they are installed, ./configure should find them and use them. If they aren't, ./configure will have a warning at the end about it.

One thing I neglected to mention earlier is that I installed all this to a 32 bit wineprefix. If you haven't done that, you need to. http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#32_bit_wineprefix

And if you are still using 1.6.1, you need to upgrade. That version is over two years old and you may simply be running into bugs that have already been fixed in the development branch.[/quote]

Running 1.7.54 now. Will try to do a bit more tomorrow. By the way, thanks for all the help.