U 14.04 Updates, June 5, Break All Older Win Apps in Wine?

[Lah Ca]

Interesting.

The June 5 updates to Ubuntu 12.04 x64 installed have broken every older Win (3.1/95 era) application I have installed in Wine. None of them will even start. I cannot even attempt to reinstall them as the executables for installation will not run. Among the casualties: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (a major loss), Mailwasher something.something (a major loss), Kai's Power Goo (no loss), Hover and Pinball (from the Win95 CD - no loss), everything from the old Win 3.1 Windows Entertainment Pack (1 through 4 - no real loss, except for Chip's Challenge), etc.

Winedevice and Wineserver attempt to start when one tries to launch one of the older applications, and the busy icon mouse pointer spins for a bit. But then after a few seconds the two processes crash. And of course the Windows application never launches. Later Win applications seem unaffected.

Any ideas?

Thx.

[dimesio]

http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22568

[dimesio]

Info on the workaround has been added to the FAQ: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-92be9f5 ... 7864737f2e.

[Lah Ca]

http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22568

Thx. I found the above some time after I had started this thread, but as I had to wait for my post to be published (wise - this seems to be a very nice, clean and orderly forum), I was not able to indicate such.

Info on the workaround has been added to the FAQ: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-92be9f5 ... 7864737f2e.

Thx. I assume that the workaround listed is this:

10.22. 16-bit applications fail to start

See https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36664. You'll need to run:

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/abi/ldt16

as root, but be aware that this has security implications.

BTW: I arrived here at Wine HQ from a thread I started here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2228133

[dimesio]

Yes, that's the workaround.

[Lah Ca]

Yes, that's the workaround.

Thx. I have not tried it yet, but someone here - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2228133 - reports that id does not work.

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/abi/ldt16
bash: /proc/sys/abi/ldt16: No such file or directory

________________________

I am possibly ill informed here, but .... my humble conclusions at this point are these:

If one needs to run an x64 version of Linux, one should forgo the use of 16bit applications (and some 32 bit ones as well because many early-ish 32 bit applications have 16 bit installers and have internal 16 bit library dependencies). The hole in the 64 bit kernel exposed by Wine's support of 16 bit applications is large enough, I think (for me), not to take the risk of a workaround or compromised custom kernel. if one cannot forgo 16 bits, there is the cumbersome workaround of 32 bit VMs, I suppose.
or

If one needs or just wants to run 16 bit and 16 bit dependent applications, one should use a 32 bit version of Linux. I just updated 12.04 LTS x86 on a notebook, and so far as I can tell, 16 bit applications run fine.

I suspect that for most tasks and most people the putting aside of the 64 bit kernel would be of little consequence - at least in the short to mid run. I am running 14.04 x64 LTS on an AMD quad core with 6 Gb of RAM - as far as I can tell, nothing that I do, have done or will do, causes the swap partition to see any activity at all, ever, and I have never noticed any RAM use higher than 2 Gb. Lots of proc time use, yes. But RAM and swap, no. Would I notice any change if I rebuilt using the 32 bit OS? Probably not. And I could repurpose at least 2 Gb of the RAM.

Thoughts?

[dimesio]

It sounds like Ubuntu backported the patch that prevents running 16 bit code on a 64 bit system, but did not backport the patch (which came a month later) that allows users to re-enable running 16 bit code. You should file a bug with Ubuntu asking them to backport the later change.

You are correct that 32 bit kernels are not affected, so downgrading your system is one option for people who don't need 64 bit.