Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Questions about Wine on macOS.
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PKBeam
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Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Post by PKBeam »

I freshly installed the latest version of Wine-devel (6.19) via Homebrew on my Apple Silicon MBP running macOS Monterey.

While commands like

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wine64 notepad
wine64 explorer
work, many EXEs such as 7-zip and Steam installers fail with the error message

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% wine64 7z1900-x64.exe
Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file.
ShellExecuteEx failed: Internal error.
What's going wrong here?
Gcenx
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Re: Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Post by Gcenx »

You can’t run 32Bit Windows binaries via wine64.
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JoseskVolpe
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Re: Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Post by JoseskVolpe »

Use "start /unix" arguments in your command

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wine64 start /unix 7z1900-x64.exe
This will start the application using it's Unix location like in Windows Explorer. Some applications doesn't work without it.
However, some 64-Bits Windows applications makes use of 32-Bits libraries. You'll need 32-Bits Wine components to be able to run it if that's the case. I'm not sure if you can do it on MacOS Monterey since 32-Bits support were discontinued on MacOS Catalina.
Gcenx
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Re: Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Post by Gcenx »

JoseskVolpe wrote: Wed Oct 27, 2021 3:22 pm Use "start /unix" arguments in your command

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wine64 start /unix 7z1900-x64.exe
This will start the application using it's Unix location like in Windows Explorer. Some applications doesn't work without it.
However, some 64-Bits Windows applications makes use of 32-Bits libraries. You'll need 32-Bits Wine components to be able to run it if that's the case. I'm not sure if you can do it on MacOS Monterey since 32-Bits support were discontinued on MacOS Catalina.
It’s very uncommon to require start let alone start / unix. Also this won’t help if the software is bundled within a 32Bit installer, if the installer is actually 64Bit it’s more lightly a permissions issue assuming they have 7z1900-x64.exe in ~/Downloads (enhanced permissions for apps now require permissions to access the location)

Wine doesn’t officially support anything past macOS Mojave due to the 32Bit removal that was in preparation for Apple Silicon chips.

Julliard along with other wine developers are working hard on converting the remaining components to PE format, this is required step for 32-on-64 that’s being worked on.

The latest packages can even run 64Bit Windows binaries on Apple Silicon systems thanks to Rosetta2, also technically not a supported target yet but some projects have found this useful.
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JoseskVolpe
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Re: Error when opening .exe: "Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file."

Post by JoseskVolpe »

Yeah you're right.. But as it increases compatibility, i guess it's a good practice to use 'start /unix' on every .exe files you're going to run, you would not like to face another weird problem like ".dll could not be found" because it's not running like it were in Explorer. Indeed, i had problems with most my programs when i run them without it.

And that's interesting to head, i've seem that ELF to PE converts are in most version releases and that's cool to now know it's related to 32-Bits support on 64-Bits only OS
That could even solve many issues on some Linux distributions like CentOS, ¿right?
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