wine users - Mar 2012 - New Ubuntu user, read FAQ, need help testing Galactic Civili

1) I read the FAQ. It say use wine 1.4. Synaptic says 1.3 is the latest
available. Is this a problem? I have the PPA loaded into synaptic.

2) Database says Galactic Civilizations (2004 game from Stardock) works, but
doesn't for me. Of course the last test is about 5 years old. I can get it
to install and I can get the program to start running, but after configuring the
galaxy things crash. I cannot interpret the information I get from executing
Code:
wine 'C:\GalCiv\galciv.exe'

 which does seem to be the command to execute the game. I'm convinced I am
missing a debugging trick or command parameter or SOMETHING that would give me
some more information. GalCiv is old, but if I can get some help, I'd like
to volunteer to keep it operational within wine.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 and wine 1.3. Any suggestions?

thomasmbrooks wrote:
> 
> I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 and wine 1.3. Any suggestions?
Versions older than 1.4 are no longer supported here. Upgrade.

If your game still doesn't work in 1.4 or later, post terminal output. Make
sure you cd to the program directory before running it.

Have you right click on exefile and check if "mark as exeucble ?

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 06:06, thomasmbrooks <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> 1) I read the FAQ. It say use wine 1.4. Synaptic says 1.3 is the latest
available. Is this a problem? I have the PPA loaded into synaptic.
>
> 2) Database says Galactic Civilizations (2004 game from Stardock) works,
but doesn't for me. Of course the last test is about 5 years old. I can get
it to install and I can get the program to start running, but after configuring
the galaxy things crash. I cannot interpret the information I get from executing
> Code:
> wine 'C:\GalCiv\galciv.exe'
>
> ?which does seem to be the command to execute the game. I'm convinced I
am missing a debugging trick or command parameter or SOMETHING that would give
me some more information. GalCiv is old, but if I can get some help, I'd
like to volunteer to keep it operational within wine.
>
> I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 and wine 1.3. Any suggestions?
wine1.3 is a package name.
Use 'wine --version' to report the actual version (or check the value
under 'Installed Version" or "Latest Version" column in
synaptic)

Thank you to everyone who responded attempting to help. I discovered several
facts which were not clear to me before and might be of use to people having
problems in the future. (Maybe some of these belong in the FAQ ?)

1) What Canonical's Synaptic package manager lists as wine-1.3 is actually
wine-1.4 (or the wine --version command is lying to me.) Lesson: Trust what wine
says about itself, not what the distributor says.

2) Attempting to execute a windows program from the GUI (i.e. right-mouse click
on a file and select Open with Wine Windows Program Loader) isn't a very
useful way to execute a program, especially if you are just trying it out for
the first time.

Wine seems to respond much better if you launch it from the CLI. In the case of
Galactic Civilizations, it won't work from the GUI and works fine from the
CLI. The suggestion to CD to the directory before running was also news to me.
Even discounting the ability to post debugging information to this forum, the
CLI is just more likely to work, at least in my limited experience.

3) Wanting an icon I can click on, I use a text editor to create script to
launch the program as I would from the CLI, which saves keystrokes and returns
the user to the desired simple interface. Just save the script file to your
desktop.

4) The execute bit cannot be set on a CD-ROM file. There is probably an
appropriate way to do this, perhaps "wine start executable.exe", but
my solution was simply to copy the CD to the local filesystem and load it from
there. Again, this is a simple solution to what might be a common newbie problem
that could be in the FAQ.

There should be (or if there is, I couldn't find it) a basic set of
instructions on how a newbie might go about loading a Windows program and
running it from his Linux box. I assume the concept of having more people
support the database with apps they have tested is desired, so helping them get
started is a useful thing in general. Perhaps I will write such a file.
Meanwhile I'm going to sign up in the app database as being a tester for
GalCiv.