wine users - Jul 2006 - Inability to proceed with installation of Windows app

I used to use Windows; now I use Linux. One application I used under 
Windows was MS Money; under Linux, I've been using Gnucash instead. 
However, Gnucash has been causing me some problems recently, so I 
thought of trying to use Wine to run my old copy of MS Money under Linux.

I downloaded and installed an RPM of Wine for my distribution, 
wine-core-0.9.16-2.fc3.i386.rpm. That done, I used IEs4Linux to get 
MSIE6 running with Wine. I can browse with MSIE6, but really installed 
it because it's said to be necessary to have a working version of MSIE 
in order to install MS Money.

I next tried to install MS Money from CD-ROM. However, when I ran the 
setup utility, I couldn't proceed because the successive installation 
windows were all blank, though buttons in the windows (also blank) did 
appear.

I didn't find any reference to such a problem in the Wine documentation 
and don't know what its cause might be. I do have a folder called fonts 
in c:\windows with 40 items in it and MSIE6 appears to work properly so 
far as text is concerned, given my brief use of it.

Do I need additional fonts or is there some other reason why the 
installation text doesn't appear?

Thanks for your attention,

Leslie

On 7/24/06, Leslie Katz <lesliek@ozemail.com.au>
wrote:
> I next tried to install MS Money from CD-ROM. However, when I ran the
> setup utility, I couldn't proceed because the successive installation
> windows were all blank, though buttons in the windows (also blank) did
> appear.
>
> I didn't find any reference to such a problem in the Wine documentation
> and don't know what its cause might be. I do have a folder called fonts
> in c:\windows with 40 items in it and MSIE6 appears to work properly so
> far as text is concerned, given my brief use of it.
The appdb page does mention it:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=4641

Apparently someone was able to install it in spite of the lack of text
but not run it. Not very promising..

Does the lack of text prevent the installer from working? What happens
if you click the buttons anyway?

You could help the Wine project by trying to install it with Wine's
built-in internet explorer replacement and filing a bug if it doesn't
work. It changed significantly since 0.9.16 so you'd want to use
0.9.17, move away .wine, and start with the money installer. You may
need to edit the registry to make the app think you have IE 6 (see
http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys)

-- 
Vincent Povirk

Vincent Povirk wrote:
> Wine does have something like Add/Remove programs, but it's not
> obvious. The command you need is "wine uninstaller".
>
> Your entire fake windows machine is stored in ~/.wine. All you need to
> do to start over is get rid of that directory.
>
> Or you can have wine use a different directory by setting WINEPREFIX:
> export WINEPREFIX=~/some_other_directory
> Before you use it in the new directory, you'll need to use the
> "wineprefixcreate" command to have it build a new fake windows
machine
> there.
>
> You can get 20050211 from cvs:
> export CVSROOT=:pserver:cvs@cvs.winehq.org:/home/wine
> cvs login
> (you need to enter a password of 'cvs')
> cvs -z 3 checkout -r Wine-20050212 wine
>
> When you build wine from source and don't install it, the wine command
> is located in /path/to/source/tree/wine. The wineprefixcreate command
> is located in /path/to/source/tree/wine/tools/wineprefixcreate.
>
> Just don't use that version of wine with the same WINEPREFIX as a more
> recent (0.9.x) version. A lot of things have changed since then, and I
> think the result will be very broken. 
>
Thanks for the above information, Vincent.

Consistent with your advice repeated more than once, I'm not going to 
try the old version until I'm satisfied that I've tried everything 
possible with the new version, but at least I know now how to get the 
old version if I want. I'm now going to try all the things mentioned 
under "Troubleshooting" in the User Guide.

I know this'll be a bit heretical, but the only program I really want to 
try to get running under Wine is my ancient Money program, so, if it 
comes to it, I'll give the old version of Wine a go without worrying 
about its effect on my running newer versions of Wine.

Even if nothing ever works, I must say I did find it exciting to see 
MSIE6 running under Wine, even though I've avoided running IE under 
Windows whenever I've been able. Seeing it running reminded me of that 
comment of Samuel Johnson's when James Boswell told him he'd heard a 
woman preaching. Johnson's comment was: "Sir, a woman's preaching
is
like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are 
surprised to find it done at all."


Best wishes,

Leslie