wine users - Sep 2009 - Absolute noob needs help getting and useing the right bits

We are trialing UBUNTU on my son's computer and want to load WINE so that he
can use some of his windows programs - of course mostly games.....

Our problem is that the PC is a standalone with no internet connection at this
time - it will soon. We downloaded wine-1.1.28.tar.bz2 onto a usb drive and
copied over, but we are such know-nothings about this that we are stuck. I have
seen something about a key but I am not sure that we need it.

We managed to get it to do something but the window closes too fast to read the
message, and we don't know where to go from there.

My son knows even less than I do so we need some really basic instructions on
what to get and where, and what to do with it.

Sorry if this is silly, but I am interested in this OS, and I really want to
give my son the opportunity to get involved in the "underside of
computers", which if course is not as open on windows etc. as it is with
this.

Make fun of my lack of knowledge by all means (I can take it  [Laughing] ) but
please give us some absolute noob help - you can not insult my intelligence on
this matter, no matter how hard you try. [Rolling Eyes]  [Embarassed] 
[Laughing]  [Laughing]  [Laughing]  [Laughing]

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave.

Skellibert wrote:
> We are trialing UBUNTU on my son's computer ...
> We downloaded wine-1.1.28.tar.bz2 onto a usb drive and copied over,
You need ".deb" file instead. You really do not want to start from
compiling Wine from source.

Also make sure to check all games you want to run in AppDB. Some might have few
extra requirements.

On 09/01/2009 12:54 AM, Skellibert wrote:
> We are trialing UBUNTU
I do not have any experience installing wine without internet, hopefully 
someone can help with that. My two cents in general:


The best bet for a person new to this is to wait until you have internet 
for that computer. Once that happens you can install wine using drop 
down boxes and mouse clicks instead of trying to copy a bunch of missing 
files over to compile it.

When the machine has internet go to the add/remove software option in 
one of the drop down menus from the bar across the top of your desktop 
(sorry, I don't use Ubuntu so I do not know the exact names of the menus 
it uses). Type WINE in the search box and that program will find it for 
you in the repositories (repositories are approved storage servers for 
files that are already complied to work in your version of linux. The 
add/remove programs option will use the internet connection to find what 
you need in the repositories and grab it for you).

When you tell it to install wine it will also take a minute and check to 
be sure your computer has all the extra files wine needs to run properly 
(dependencies). If your computer is missing anything it will give you 
list of what is needed and you can tell it to get those for you as well. 
This way you get the right files for your system and you don't have to 
figure out how to compile them and track down dependencies yourself.

One warning - the add/remove programs method will only grab whatever 
version of wine is in it's repositories. This may not be the very newest 
version of wine available - to get that you would have to download and 
compile it yourself. Many repositories are 3-5 versions of wine behind 
the 'very newest', but that is not always a bad thing for new people. 
Any problems with the older version have usually been found by then and 
the webpage for your program may already have hints to work around the 
bugs until a newer wine version is available.

You will want to look up whatever windows programs he wants to run in 
wine at this website:  http://appdb.winehq.org/

The site can be confusing at first, but search for each program and you 
should get to a page with information on how well the program works 
using wine and ideas of things to do to make it work better, if needed.