Thread: Play your Windows Games with Wine

Wine is the best solution to get Windows applications to work on Linux. Wine has been around for more than 15 years, and can handle a lot of applications seamlessly. However, many applications don't work as well as they would have on Windows, and many of the newer games in particular may face problems. Wine (which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator) also maintains a library called WineLib, which software developers are increasingly adhering to. This simply means that a software developed for Windows will work on Linux through Wine with almost zero additional effort on the part of programmers.

Now what Wine does is add a processing layer between the operating system (Linux) and the Windows application. This means that running a number of Windows applications on Wine at the same time is not very advisable. However, the combination of Wine and Linux is still faster than Windows XP in many cases, and some of the older games that do not run on XP or Vista run perfectly fine on Wine.
Wine comes as a standard with many distros, but ifit does not, go to package manager or software manager and search for Wine. The installation varies from a 6-MB to a 15-MB download depending on the dependencies and the version of the software. The latest beta version of Wine supports more software, buf is not as stable. Ubuntu, Mint or Debian-based users will require the deb package, and Mandriva, SUSE or RedHat users would require the RPM package. When Wine is installed, it adds itself as a separate category in the applications list. Notepad is one of the few programs given as a default along with Wine.

Wine uses a directory inside the Linux file system as the C drive of a Windows system. Normally, this address is /home/user/wine/dosdevices/c: All the games that you want to install, should be installed in this location. Installing a game is relatively easy, as the installation will have windows similar to those in the Windows operating system, irrespective of how your Linux distro is themed. You can also copy and paste game folders from another location into this address. Games that run when the files are copy-pasted run particularly well with Wine.

Once the game is pasted, you will have to check for a few things. To see if Open GL is working properly on your system, go to the terminal, and type:
$ glxinfo I grep direct
If you see:
direct rendering: Yes
then Open GL is working perfectly fine. If the system does not display the above message, install Open GL again, or update your distribution. Next, go to Menu>Wine>Configure Wine>Drives and make sure that all the CD/DVD drives that you have is detected. This is essential for games that require the CD/DVD to be in the drive to work properly. Once you put in a CD or DVD into the disk drive, there will be a prompt asking you whether or not to autorun, On Linux, the safest thing to do is to click on No or Cancel depending on your distro.



On most distros, an icon for the CD/DVD folder will appear on the desktop. Open up the folder and find the executable file. All EXE files are picked up by Wine automatically. When installing a game, make sure that Wine is not running any other application. Another important step is to install winetricks. Wine tricks is a small script to install some proprietary runtime libraries that are required for some games to run. This includes the DirectX 9 redistributable. To install winetricks, search for it in the software. Now you are good to go for most games.

Wine normally installs the game in /home/user/wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/Publisher/Game Name. It is possible to install the game anywhere on the computer, but this is not advisable if the game needs to place files in other folders on the C drive. The Linux desktop will be handled as the desktop for your Windows machine, so that is where the desktop icons will show up. Many games require the Microsoft XML parser, which basically verifies XML code for inaccuracies. This parser is bundled with most installers, and if detected previously, will not get installed. Just
select a directory to installer the parser and click on OK if this prompt shows up.

You can now start the game and play away. If a particular game is not working properly, try changing the version of Windows that Wine mimicks. This can be done by going to Menu > Wine > Configure Wine> Applications> Windows Version and selecting a different version of Windows (the default is XP).

One of the most common problems that Wine encounters while emulating games is that the menu of the game might not display properly. The graphical elements will either be missing, or appear as blocks of uniform colour. If this happens, go to Menu> Wine> Configure Wine> Graphics and uncheck 'Allow the window manager to decorate the windows' and 'Allow window manager to control the windows'. This is the most common workaround for the problem.

There may be specific problems apart from these for other games. The workaround for these problems invariably involves modifYing some INI files in the system folder of the game so that it is compatible with Wine. The specific fixes for the problems are available easily by the Linux community all over the internet, and are pretty easy to follow.

You can download here tips-linux.net/en/content/cedega-70