Setting Up WSWin in Mandrake 8

[Forum Admin]

On a long installed Linux Mandrake 8 PC I decided to have another look at getting WSWin 2.0 up & running.

Firstly I downloaded the latest CodeWeavers wine and installed that. The installation didn't go completely smoothly as wine needed a utility that hadn't been installed - I can't remember what it was now - after some hunting on the internet I found the file, which wasn't listed in the installable options, and installed it.

Great, now to run WSWin, not so great. I thought I'd also downloaded the latest FreeType font system, but perhaps not - I'm having to use an excruciatingly slow dial-up connection.

However, I can get WSWin to load up, with problems. Perhaps some of these are due to the FreeType system being out-of-date, I have 2.0.2 installed, but it wants 2.0.5.

Here are my boot up messages:

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[mpetrie@localhost mpetrie]$ wine /mnt/win_c/wswin/wswin.exe
Invoking /opt/wine/bin/wine.bin /mnt/win_c/wswin/wswin.exe ...
Wine cannot find certain functions that it needs inside the FreeType
font library. ?To enable Wine to use TrueType fonts please upgrade
FreeType to at least version 2.0.5.
http://www.freetype.org
err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x400fb57c "../../scheduler/syslevel.c: Win16Mutex" wait timed out, retrying (60 sec) tid=0807b3d8
fixme:ole:OleRegisterClientDoc16 (WSWin 2.0,Untitled-1,...): stubSo it looks like I'm in for a long download to fix that, and I suspect that this may fix the style and font size listboxes being empty and font select listbox disabled that I see.

However, the main menu bar is also missing but can be restored by right-clicking in the menu and button bar area and cancelling the dialog you get, but then any ALT+letter menu command removes the menu bar again. Clicking on the menu items is ignored.

Also, the WSWin page text frame border is not correctly drawn (the green dotted box), especially the vertical lines - these are partly solid, and partly missing.

Also, the key response speed has la ong delay (0.5s?)

Then, on the first start of WSWin it complained of no printer being set. OK, it can't find default.wst. Where does wine get the wswin.ini from?

Then, on the second and subsequent starts of WSWin it complained:

 ?"Can't create directory for temporary files. Exit Windows and set your
 ? TEMP environment variable to a valid drive and path."

That's my experience so far.


Cheers
Mike

[deedee]

Good heavens, what a lot of problems you have had  !

When you say the latest CodeWeavers, which one was that? The April 2002 one complained about the Freetype libraries being old, but the Sept. 2002 one didn't. In both cases, I had (and still have) an older version of the Freetype libraries than it wanted. I think it's the one you have. That doesn't stop Wine from working, at least it didn't on my system.

However, you do need to read your ms-win fonts into Drakfont or whatever font manager you like. Everything was drawn correctly on mine the first time. When I lost it and had problems, it didn't look right when it came up.  However, I had installed Mandrake again and forgot to identify the ms-win fonts. So the second time, Wine went on before Drakfont had found and incorporated the ms-win fonts.

Although I was still having problems after that, everything was drawn correctly and in the correct fonts once I had Drakfont find them.

Wine likes CUPS for printing. So even though it doesn't ask for it as a dependency, you should install cups and the cups libraries in order to get the printer to work. It prints locally despite cups being the remote printing system.

I started getting the "TEMP environment" message with the Sept. 2002 CodeWeavers. I finally solved that by going back to my April 2002 config and using that instead of the config that came with the Sept. release. I'll have to copy that to you so you can see what worked.

Like you, I started getting this message, but only with WSWin2, not with any other ms-win app.

err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x400fb57c "../../scheduler/syslevel.c: Win16Mutex" wait timed out, retrying (60 sec) tid=0807b3d8

I've not figured out yet what it's looking for and that's where I got stuck on this go-round with WSWin2. It shuts itself off when it times out. Do you know what "Win16Mutex" is?

deedee

[Forum Admin]

Hi,

I remembered the missing program that stops wine from running, it was xmessage, which lives in /usr/X11R6/bin. I'd probably elected not to install some X applications, not wanting Xeyes, and other such fluff, and lost xmessage in the process. I had to search the Internet to find which extra package I needed to install because xmessage wasn't listed anywhere I could find it.

Here's the error message you'll get if you don't have xmessage installed:

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Warning:
 ? ?The Wine launcher is unable to find the xmessage program, ?which it needs to properly notify you of Wine execution status ?or problems.
 ? ?This launcher script relies heavily on finding this tool,
and without it, it will behave very poorly.
 ? ?We strongly recommend that you use your distribution's software methods to locate xmessage, or alternatively use your favourite internet search engine to find out ?how you are supposed to install xmessage on your system.I do have font problems. I've now taken a trip into the Mandrake Control Center > System > Fonts and told it to Get Windows fonts. I quite after a couple of hours of it seeming to be doing nothing and tried again. The second time it finished quite quickly, but I'm still not there yet and now get lots of font errors on starting wine, but no WSWin at all! Perhaps I need to remove them again and use the Strong Verification option when importing them?

Back again - tried that, and cancelled it after about 6 hours! Now on trying to start WSWin I get WSWin's error dialog for a missing Temp directory.

A Mutex (Mutual Exclusion Semaphor) is a lock on a processing thread. So here, as far as I can see, the Win16Mutex will stop anything else making a Windows 16-bit call until the current process has completed. I suspect it's the OLE registration it was waiting for.


Cheers
Mike

[deedee]

One of the things I'm going to try is allowing whatever distribution I'm using to install its version of Wine first (Mandrake and Red Hat). Then, I'll uninstall it and install the later release of Wine that I really want.

I suspect that a number of things happen when that first installation takes place to ensure that whatever version came with the distribution has a good chance of working. I believe that's what happened with my WSWin2 successful installation of Wine.

Uninstalling the distribution's release may leave in place a number of files that were not absolutely critical as dependencies, but did make it work better.

At one point, I also got the xmessage is missing error, but the file was there and not missing at all. When I changed to my earlier config file, that error disappeared.

I've gzipped my entire config file if you'd like to see it. I have it on a password-protected directory on my web site. Let me know if you want to see it and I'll send you the info on how to download it. I didn't want to e-mail it to you since your system is using such a slow dial-up connection. However, if you'd prefer an e-mail attachment, I can do that too.

The following is the section that identifies the paths. I believe it is here that eliminated the error messages with xmessage and Temp. There were some minor (to me) differences between the sections in the April 2002 release and the September one. However, changing back to the April config file made a major difference in Wine's performance.

From Wine config (in ~/.wine)

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[Drive A]
"Path" = "/mnt/fd0"
"Type" = "floppy"
"Label" = "Floppy"
"Filesystem" = "win95"
"Serial" = "87654321"
"Device" = "/dev/fd0"

[Drive C]
"Path" = "/mnt/windows"
"Type" = "hd"
"Label" = "WINDOWS"
"Filesystem" = "win95"

[Drive D]
"Path" = "/mnt/cdrom"
"Type" = "cdrom"
"Label" = "CD-Rom"
"Filesystem" = "win95"
; make sure that device is correct and has proper permissions !
"Device" = "/dev/cdrom"

[Drive E]
"Path" = "/tmp"
"Type" = "hd"
"Label" = "Tmp Drive"
"Filesystem" = "win95"

[Drive F]
"Path" = "${HOME}"
"Type" = "network"
"Label" = "Home"
"Filesystem" = "win95"

[wine]
"Windows" = "c:\\windows"
"System" = "c:\\windows\\system"
"Temp" = "c:\\windows\\temp"
"Path" = "c:\\windows;c:\\windows\\system;c:\\windows\\temp;c:\\wswin;c:\\eudora;e:\\;e:\\test;f:\\"
"Profile" = "c:\\windows\\Profiles\\Administrator"
"GraphicsDriver" = "x11drv"
;"ShowDirSymlinks" = "1"
;"ShowDotFiles" = "1"
"ShellLinker" = "wineshelllink"
"printer" = "on"

Mandrake uses the /mnt directory for the windows partition -- so /mnt/windows is really C: from Wine's perspective. Mandrake also put in a /tmp directory at installation. I'm using a win98se partition, however, I'm not using the ms-win dlls. C:\eudora is also on the path. Finally, in addition to installing CUPS, the last line of the [wine] section shows the printer as "on."

Perhaps I need to remove them again and use the Strong Verification option when importing them?

Actually, the "Strong Verification" gets you fewer fonts. What it does is eliminate any "bogus" fonts (I presume fonts that are really bitmaps or something). You don't need all the fonts -- just the basics like Arial, Marlet, Times Roman, stuff like that. And, of course, any fonts that you like to use.

A Mutex (Mutual Exclusion Semaphor) is a lock on a processing thread. So here, as far as I can see, the Win16Mutex will stop anything else making a Windows 16-bit call until the current process has completed. I suspect it's the OLE registration it was waiting for.

Okay, so it's whatever precedes that message is where the problem is. I'll pay attention to that to see what's hanging it up.

deedee