Ubuntu and Wine help.

jpeg

So I just installed Ubuntu as my main OS yesterday and I spent today trying to figure out Wine. I have no knowledge of terminal, wine, or anything Linux prior to yesterday aside from messing around with Fedora Core a few years ago. Here is what I want to do:

I have my harddrive set up where the partition with Ubuntu on it is 10gb, and the remaining ~70gb of my harddrive is still ntfs from when I had windows. That ntfs partition has lots of things I would like to keep, ie lots of music, and specifically, my games. I can mount it just fine and see all the files, that isn't the problem...

How can I make wine run these already set up games? I am pretty stumped by wine in general and the internets aren't helping me. What I want to do, is basically tell wine to open the exe's that are already installed in that ntfs partition. When I navigate to that folder and say, try to run "wine steam.exe", I get an error to the tune of Failed to MapViewOfFile. Would someone mind holding my hand through the process of making wine work for me?

Trus

When I was trying to get City of Heroes to run in Ubuntu I had to reinstall the game onto the fake windows directory Wine makes and then run that version.

HorizonXP

Good job on giving Ubuntu the plunge! Just a couple sources that will probably help you out.

1. http://www.ubuntuforums.com/ - Take the helpfulness that is PA H/A, and apply it to Ubuntu.
2. #ubuntu on irc.ubuntu.com - You can usually get most of your answers here pretty darn quickly.

That said, I actually don't use Wine all that much. But I've used it enough to know that what you want to do... isn't going to work like that. Wine is an application layer that reimplements the Windows API. To run programs with it, you need to install it inside Wine. This is usually done by typing wine setup.exe. The installer will (hopefully) run, and you'll install the program. It will install to C:\Program Files\Whatever, which is actually mapped to /home/your_user_name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Whatever.

Another option you might have is to run a virtualization program, which will run your Windows (XP?) install directly. I've used VMWare Server for this, works great, but admittedly, I highly doubt games will work through this. So for games, Wine's your best bet.

Search Google, try those two sources I told you about, and you should be able to find your answer.

P.S. Because you're trying to run Windows program (esp. games) within Ubuntu, you're going to get frustrated. Just remember that this isn't exactly Ubuntu/Linux's fault, and the fact that it's working at all is pretty amazing. Also remember that there are some fantastic, free games available for Linux as well, that rival some games in the Windows world.

Have fun!

seasleepy

jpeg wrote: »

So I just installed Ubuntu as my main OS yesterday and I spent today trying to figure out Wine. I have no knowledge of terminal, wine, or anything Linux prior to yesterday aside from messing around with Fedora Core a few years ago. Here is what I want to do:

I have my harddrive set up where the partition with Ubuntu on it is 10gb, and the remaining ~70gb of my harddrive is still ntfs from when I had windows. That ntfs partition has lots of things I would like to keep, ie lots of music, and specifically, my games. I can mount it just fine and see all the files, that isn't the problem...

How can I make wine run these already set up games? I am pretty stumped by wine in general and the internets aren't helping me. What I want to do, is basically tell wine to open the exe's that are already installed in that ntfs partition. When I navigate to that folder and say, try to run "wine steam.exe", I get an error to the tune of Failed to MapViewOfFile. Would someone mind holding my hand through the process of making wine work for me?

A google for the error brings up this page from Valve indicating that wine and NTFS (or more specifically, the linux NTFS driver) don't get along well. The driver site itself offers a solution, but it might not a particularly useful one for you since you'll probably still need to install the program via Wine before it'll run. You could give it a shot though.

Here's a tutorial about the VMWare thing HorizonXP mentioned, but yeah, not so useful for the gaming (unless you're running 2D stuff).

jpeg

Thanks for the help, guys. I'll keep those links in mind (bookmarked already). While I am here, though...

I formatted my ntfs to ext3 today so I wouldn't have problems related to that with wine, but of course, there's more!

So, I mounted my ~70gb partition at /home/kevin/Files and that works great, I got all my music back off my ipod and into that partition just fine, and I even installed steam there and it works! But, when I try to install TF2, it bitches about how I don't have enough space, because it is reading the space of the partition that the steam/games partition is mounted on. Is there a workaround for this or should I just try again another way?

cyphr

HorizonXP wrote: »

That said, I actually don't use Wine all that much. But I've used it enough to know that what you want to do... isn't going to work like that. Wine is an application layer that reimplements the Windows API. To run programs with it, you need to install it inside Wine. This is usually done by typing wine setup.exe. The installer will (hopefully) run, and you'll install the program. It will install to C:\Program Files\Whatever, which is actually mapped to /home/your_user_name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Whatever.

Except, well, you're wrong.

NTFS support in the kernel has gotten pretty damn good, and there's no reason, in theory, Wine can't run an existing installation off an NTFS partition. At most, you'll just have to symlink to the Windows path.

Examples:
Using a pre-existing Steam installation
Using a pre-existing WoW installation (Method 3)