Printing from wine32 on 64-bit hardware

[gurfle]

I am trying to print from a win95/8 32-bit binary using wine 1.8.7-2 on a a 64-bit machine running debian 9.2 (stretch).

It appears from this post that wine32 requires cups:i386. Indeed this worked flawlessly for me on a 32-bit machine also on debian stretch and using wine 1.8.7-2.

Unfortunately it looks like installing cups:i386 requires removal of cups:amd64 in debian stretch (see this post).

Even if this conflict between 32- and 64-bit cups in debian can be overcome, I am wondering if it were somehow possible/reasonable for wine32 to be spiffed up to use 64-bit cups if it's available and 32-bit cups is not.

I am quite ignorant of the intricacies involved, so should replies say the idea makes no sense while clarifying a bit how come, that too would be nice.

As a complete wine-noob I must say that it is a truly impressive construct, and even if what I am suggesting about cups is "asking too much" of a system whose goal is to remain as slender as possible, having to create a separately bootable linux setup for the sole purpose of running wine32 with cups:i386 is by no means an obstacle of note.

Unbelievably, I was able to get the VESA patch by "Display Doctor" enabling its "Universal VESA Bios Extension" to actually fix some video problems required to make an over-20-year-old game work .

[dimesio]

Wine uses 64 bit cups for 64 bit Windows apps. Most Windows apps are 32 bit, and 32 bit apps require 32 bit libraries.

[gurfle]

I suspected it was too much to expect 64-bit cups to work with wine32.

Has anyone here seen 32- and 64-bit cups installed together on the same debian-type platform (or any linux, for that matter)? It sure would be handy for printing 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit hardware via wine. Certainly a lot less hassle than wiping out and then restoring 64-bit cups every time 32-bit windows printing is desired (of course assuming printing is needed from regular linux apps - a pretty reasonable assumption).

If co-existence of the two cups is really a no-go as well, the only practical solution then is probably to set up an additional linux boot partition for the sole purpose of running wine32. Certainly doable; but being lazy, I was just hoping to get away without.

Cheers, Nick

[dimesio]

My distro, openSUSE, has -32bit compatibility packages that can be installed alongside the regular 64 bit ones. I believe Fedora simply allows the side-by-side installation of both the regular 32 and 64 bit packages.

Debian started the move to multiarch several years ago, and should allow both 32 and 64 bit packages to be installed side-by-side, though there are some packages that still aren't multiarch-compliant. There is a list of packages that are known to still be problems on https://wiki.winehq.org/Multiarch, but I don't know how complete it is; CUPS isn't on it, but perhaps the issue is one of its dependencies. Quite a few of the packages are marked fixed in Buster but not in Stretch, so perhaps you need a newer version of Debian.

[spoon0042]

I don't think you need both versions of the cups package installed, just the library libcups2:i386

Seems to work here with 32-bit wine anyway. Also 64-bit stretch. 9.4 though? Also debian's wine packages are years old (more or less), which may or may not matter, but winehq built packages for current versions of wine are described here: https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian

[gurfle]

I don't think you need both versions of the cups package installed, just the library libcups2:i386

Perfect! That's all I needed here on stretch 9.2. After adding printer-driver-cups-pdf:i386 for the "print-to pdf" feature, I'm all set now