wine users - Jun 2008 - strange display problems with configuring and running wine

I am running Arch linux on my laptop and I installed wine a while back to check
if one application I use would work with it or not. Well I couldnt get it
running since it apparently uses MS .NET framework which doesnt seem to work
very well with wine.

But to the issue at hand. Today I decided to try off another application, well
okay a game actually, and I ran winecfg as normal user to re-make all the
directories etc but then I ended up with a odd problem. My screen went crazy and
when I took a screenshot after a while it looked like this:

[Image: http://www.saunalahti.fi/hotti/pics/pic1.png ]

when in reality what I would see on my screen is this (picture taken with my
camera):

[Image: http://www.saunalahti.fi/hotti/pics/pic2.jpg ]

if I run winecfg AGAIN after restarting my X server with ctrl-alt-backspace it
works fine and no trouble. BUT when I try to run the game I wanted to try, the
game works but the screen is distorted again.

I tried reinstalling wine with no luck so the problem must lie somewhere else.
I'm not a newbie with computers since I've fiddled around with them my
whole life but I am rather new to linux.

I am running version 0.9.61 of wine since that is the current stable release in
Arch linux repos. The odd thing is that a few weeks back when I installed wine
for the first time it worked just fine.

So could someone please help me figure out what to do next to get wine working
again so I can play Slaves to Amarok II: Dwarf Fortress on my linux laptop too
and not just on my windows desktop? Thank you for any advice you can give.

Sekra wrote:
> So could someone please help me figure out what to do next to get wine
working again so I can play Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress on my linux
laptop too and not just on my windows desktop? Thank you for any advice you can
give.

Try virtual desktop mode (winecfg->graphics tab). It might be the game
selects display resolution your monitor does not support.

well the problem occurs also when I run winecfg and if there is no .wine
directory. But I tried that and it did not help. Again the screen goes crazy and
it looks like there would actually be 2 desktops when the screen is
"crazy" split right down the middle of my screen. Could wine for some
strange reason think that I have a cloned or extended desktop since I did try to
view videos via my TV a while back but it didnt work since I could only get B/W
picture to my tv using a s-video cable..

I tried uninstalling again the package from Arch linux repos and I installed
from the 1.0 sources. Same thing happens again, when I run winecfg the screen
goes haywire just the same...

Sekra wrote:
> I tried uninstalling again the package from Arch linux repos and I
installed from the 1.0 sources. Same thing happens again, when I run winecfg the
screen goes haywire just the same...

Sounds like driver bug to me. What video card and drivers are you using?

I have a laptop with Ati Mobility Radeon X1400 and using the 
latest package from Arch linux repos which is 

http://archlinux.org/packages/317/

and ATI Catalyst Control Center says:

Driver version    8.50.3

Looks like this has allready been posted at:

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1173

This  also happens to me when i try to open guild wars. But when i take a screen
shot and open it, it just looks normal.