Best Wine Front-End

silveringking · Post by **silveringking** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 12:55 am

Hello I was wondering what are the best Wine Front-Ends. PlayonLinux is excellent with games that is for sure... But when I try to install the copy I bought of Babylon Pro 9 a few years ago, when I try to push the dictionaries I simply can't... So I would like to know what is the most friendly front-end in order to install applications that need patches and updates (in this case my babylon michaelis dictionaries, which need to be installed on the directory as babylon...).
Also may I ask you if it is possible/legal to install directx under Wine, you know to play

. I would prefer an front-end with a lot of support and updated. And one where I could install everything need for certain functions under the same "prefix" like on PlayOnLinux...
Thank you!

silveringking · Post by **silveringking** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 12:59 am

Oh I forgot I'm using Linux Mint 11, this forum needs an edit button

.

Post by **dimesio** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 7:40 am

Wine "front ends" are not supported here. This forum is for plain Wine only.

jjmckenzie · Post by **jjmckenzie** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 1:35 pm

silveringking wrote:Hello I was wondering what are the best Wine Front-Ends. PlayonLinux is excellent with games that is for sure... But when I try to install the copy I bought of Babylon Pro 9 a few years ago, when I try to push the dictionaries I simply can't... So I would like to know what is the most friendly front-end in order to install applications that need patches and updates (in this case my babylon michaelis dictionaries, which need to be installed on the directory as babylon...).
Also may I ask you if it is possible/legal to install directx under Wine, you know to play . I would prefer an front-end with a lot of support and updated. And one where I could install everything need for certain functions under the same "prefix" like on PlayOnLinux...
Thank you!

We only can support 'vanilla' Wine. Third Party front ends like POL have their own support forums/mail lists. We cannot even support winetricks which is trying to bring POL/POM support under a modifiable BASH script.

Why are you looking at using a Front End?

James

Post by **DanKegel** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 5:58 pm

The games support in Winetricks is really trying to bring
easy game installation to vanilla wine. It doesn't install
its own versions of Wine, like POL does. So it's closer
to being supportable here... though since it doesn't have
too many games yet, it's kind of a moot point.

jjmckenzie · Post by **jjmckenzie** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 6:13 pm

On 8/7/11 3:58 PM, DanKegel wrote:

The games support in Winetricks is really trying to bring
easy game installation to vanilla wine. It doesn't install
its own versions of Wine, like POL does. So it's closer
to being supportable here... though since it doesn't have
too many games yet, it's kind of a moot point.

That is true Dan.

Winetricks don't modify or patch Wine's code. However, the Wine project
cannot support winetricks or any other third party add-on. POL patches
wine code with patches that have not been approved by the Wine Project
and other changes. Winebottler (a product for the Mac operating system)
pulled in native dlls and such. Don't know about WineSkin, but it is
also a product for the Mac Operating System.

Again, the question is, why does the original poster want/desire to use
a product that we don't support and has been reported to have little or
no support in the past?

James

DaVince · Post by **DaVince** » Sun Aug 07, 2011 6:33 pm

To make things "easier", of course. Configuring everything about a Wine install through a GUI tends to be so much easier than doing it yourself. However...

- These forums (/ this mailing list) are excellent for getting support to get something to run, especially when tricks required for older Wine releases actually break the app in a new version of Wine. Not only that, it leads to bug reports for Wine itself much more quickly than any front-end.
- Winetricks already does a good job at the things it supports, and is very minimal. It is very up-to-date because one of the Wine devs actually maintains the project.
- Considering what a mess these front-ends make out of things sometimes, using Wine as-is seems like the best solution anyway. Prefixes aren't a difficult concept.

silveringking · Post by **silveringking** » Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:33 am

Well Babylon Pro 9 is a dictionary program ^^ babylon.com with support for such dictionaries such as oxford and michaelis and such... It is good for me because I am a fansubber...

Anyway can you point me out a good tutorial for installing programs?

Thank you!

Post by **dimesio** » Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:13 am

silveringking wrote: Anyway can you point me out a good tutorial for installing programs?

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-f351523 ... 8da63be66f

winefan62 · Post by **winefan62** » Mon Aug 08, 2011 11:18 am

Just for the record :
- PoL builds CLEAN and VANILLA builds of wine, from a debian 6 Stable server with official and untouched sources files.
- PoL patch wine ONLY if there is no other choices and ALWAYS with patches from appdb.
- PoLv4 is introducing user-friendly log system to ease posting AppDB tests (childly reproducible with plain wine and winetricks for example) and bug reports.
- User even can, if he want to, use builtin PoL function to install all dependancies with winetricks (for AppDB test prupose for example)

I don't know other projects doing so much effort to please wine devs...

Post by **dimesio** » Mon Aug 08, 2011 2:42 pm

winefan62 wrote: - PoL patch wine ONLY if there is no other choices and ALWAYS with patches from appdb.

There shouldn't be any patches at all in the AppDB, but if a user has posted one there, or a link to one, it is still unsupported. The same goes for patches in Bugzilla that have not been committed. If it's not part of Wine, it's not supported.

Post by **DanKegel** » Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:03 pm

It's good that POL is trying to help, and I've had many conversations
with them in the past. They've always been friendly and interested
in my suggestions.

That said, the wine project can't support patched versions of wine.

So there's always going to be a little dynamic tension between the two projects.

(One thing POL isn't doing much of that would really help Wine is
following http://wiki.winehq.org/RegressionTesting to pinpoint which
wine change broke apps that used to work well with no patches.
Wine user Wylda excels at this; see for instance
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21154 and
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22263
That would demonstrate a real commitment to helping Wine.
It probably won't happen, since they have their hands full just keeping
POL going, and most POL scripters don't have the motivation or training
to do a real regression test. But it would be wonderful if I were wrong.)