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Tuesday 19 August 2014

New wine in old computers

I use wine. That's either "Windows Emulator" or "Wine is not an emulator", depending on how you feel. The idea is to make it possible to run Windows problems on a linux computer.

Why would I want to do that? Well, I need to run GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife); I use that to update my database of found and unfound caches, to create the files that I use to make the files for my PDA, and for all sorts of other things. I really need to be able to run GSAK, and I have an entire Windows computer just so that I can.

So I installed Wine on my Fedora version 19 linux computer, and then installed GSAK. To my great surprise, it worked. Maybe I'm a pessimist when it comes to comupter compatibility. Everything worked except for some features to do with accessing the Geocaching.com web site, and even there it mostly worked. Hurrah! So I set up cron jobs and macros, so that my updates could be done automatically.

Then, a few days later, my linux box nagged me about updates. It's so easy to update all your software on Linux, I just run "yum update", and everything gets updated.

And then GSAK worked, but a lot less than it did before. For example, I couldn't tell it to output a GPX file, which is crucial. Grrr.

My guess was that this was because Wine had been updated. The wine was version 1.7.22, so I decided to change to 1.6.2, the previous version.

That turned out to be difficult. "yum downgrade wine" looked like the right command, but it dodn't work. I'd have to install the older version 1.6.2 without yum. First I had to remove the existing version of wine. I tried "yum remove wine" but it wouldn't do it. Eventually, by doing "yum remove wine*" I got rid of the new wine.

To install the older version of wine, I couldn't just do "yum install wine" because that would have put 1.7.22 back on. So I had to download the source code of 1.6.2, compile it and install that.

yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum -y install libX11-devel freetype-devel
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.6.2.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf wine-1.6.2.tar.bz2
cd wine-1.6.2/
./tools/wineinstall



That worked, although the compile took a very long time. Then I ran GSAK, and now it works as well as it did before.

Computers are such fun!

1 comment:

  1. I used wine on my old acer netbook, not the fastest in the world but ran gsak too.

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