Fixing .Net 2.0 Not Implemented Error in Linux Wine - e.g. Crossed out Boxes in the Menu in Photomatix

If you've used Microsoft .Net inside WINE, you may have come across this issue: Instead of e.g. a slider bar showing in the menu of an application, you see a box with a red cross inside it. The fix is very, very easy with winetricks, simply execute:
winetricks gdiplus


This works nicely, e.g. for HDRSoft Photomatix 4.1 in Wine 1.2.2.

How To: Comfortably Make your own WINE Bottles

If you're installing a few programs in WINE, you may notice that they tend to influence each other negatively. The fix is to install them in completely different operating system environments, also known as WINE bottles. This way it's easy to completely remove applications by just deleting their "bottle". Let me show you how to make this effortless with standard WINE and a simple shell script.

The script is the key part. You tell it a directory where you want your bottles installed and then it will create a new folder each time you install a program. Of course you may also install several programs into one bottle. Let's call the script wine-bottle, which I suggest to put into your $PATH:

!/bin/bash
# wine-bottle v. 0.2
# (c) 2009 Linux-Tipps.blogspot.com, (c) 2009 Joost @ http://home.student.utwente.nl/j.vanderhof

# newest version at http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-make-your-own-wine-bottles.html
# published under the GPL v. 3.0 http://gplv3.fsf.org/
INSTALLDIR="$HOME/.wine/bottles"; #Set this to where you want to put your Wine bottles
[ $# -lt 1 ] && #if you gave no parameters
echo "Please give me parameters! Usage:" &&
echo "Execute a program : $0 \"BottleName\" \"Program\"" &&
echo "Configure a bottle : $0 --conf \"BottleName\"" &&
echo "List bottles : $0 --list" &&
exit 1;
[ $# -lt 2 -a $1 != "--list" ] && #if you didn't give the right parameters
echo "Please give me at least two parameters or a --list parameter! Usage:" &&
echo "Execute a program : $0 \"BottleName\" \"Program\"" &&
echo "Configure a bottle : $0 --conf \"BottleName\"" &&
echo "List bottles : $0 --list" &&
exit 1;
[ $1 == "--list" ] && #if you want to list the bottles
echo "Wine bottles in $INSTALLDIR:" &&
ls -1 $INSTALLDIR &&
exit 1;
[ -d "$INSTALLDIR" ] || ( #if installdir is not existing
echo "Root of Wine bottles not existing: $INSTALLDIR" &&
mkdir "$INSTALLDIR"
) || ( #if installdir creation failed
echo "Could not create installation Directory: \"$INSTALLDIR\"." &&
exit 1);
which wine || ( #if wine is not found
echo "Wine not found, please install it first" &&
exit 1);
[ $1 == "--conf" ] && #if you wish to configure a bottle
WINEPREFIX="$INSTALLDIR/$2/" winecfg &&
exit 1;
#finally, the only remaining possibility is you want to run an application
PREF="$1";
shift; #drop first parameter to leave the command with its parameters
WINEPREFIX="$INSTALLDIR/$PREF/" wine "${@}";

You can now use this script almost like wine. The only difference is that you first need to tell it the bottle's name. E.g. wine-bottle lingopad setup.exe installs the program inside setup.exe into the bottle lingopad. I suggest using the "create Desktop short cut" option of installers, as it lets you easily start them later, without the need to use this script.

If you want to create a backup of your bottle, simpy put the bottle directory inside $INSTALLDIR together with the related .desktop file into an archive. If you want to manually start a program, you can of course still use wine-bottle from the shell: e.g. wine-bottle lingopad "$HOME/Wine/lingopad/drive_c/Program Files/Lingopad/Lingopad.exe".

You may also want to install a current wine via the wine ubuntu repository.

Let me know if you liked this howto!

Update: Updated to Joost's version, thanks!

Update2: It seems my script has inspired "Joost". He's created a version including a simple GUI. Check out his website.

Introduction to WINE

Here's a nice little intro on what to do with wine. For help with wine, checkout Frank's Corner.

I've got Sun Java Working in my Browser in 64-Bit Linux!

I've been trying to get java to work in the browser for me for a long time now. And I've got two final results for you: First, it's (yet) impossible, the 64-bit java browser plugin will not be out before 2009.

But Secondly, it's possible and really easy with wine! Just download Firefox and install it. Then download Java and install it. Done! That easy! :) It should work the same way for Flash, etc.

Now finally I could use packstation.de in Linux!

Microsoft Office 2003 with Wine

Check out this howto install MS Office 2003 with regular Wine:
http://www.wine-reviews.net/microsoft/running-ms-office-2003-under-linux-with-wine-0952.html

Free CrossOver - Today Only!

You can download full versions of CrossOver Linux and Mac for free from their webpage today!

Chrome on Linux Now Really Easy

CodeWeavers has ported Google Chrome to Linux using Wine. You can download packages here.

Update: In my experience the package is not really worth trying. I had much better results running it with normal wine as mentioned before. The CodeWeavers package is really easy and comfortable.

But the AMD64 version I tested is also much slower and less responsive and I think it crashes more often than, but that's hard to tell with Chrome ;-). And the tabs often hang after loading a webpage and the webpage disappears until you press reload. And the letters are not on the same line, but always higher or lower.

But the cool thing about the port: SSL works. That means you can actually use google webpages with login like GMail. I hope that is ported back to wine, making chrome actually usable in Linux.

Update2: The problems I had seem to be related to 64-bit, as other webpages don't mention these issues.

Google Chrome under Linux with WINE

It turns out the guys at WineHQ already figured out how to run Google Chrome within WINE. Heres a really easy quick guide for you:

1. Get a current wine version (1.1.3+)
   
2. Download the Chrome offline installer.
3. Install normally, best with a fresh wine installation.
   
4. Go into the install directory (e.g. #cd ".wine/drive_c/windows/profiles//Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application") NOTE: this path is not exactly the same for everyone
5. Start chrome like this: wine chrome.exe --new-http --no-sandbox

To get some privacy you should also

1. Disable URL typo correction.
2. Disable website suggestions.
3. Disable Google Ad cookies.
4. Quit Chrome. Then change the browser's unique identifier in "User Data/Local State" to the values from Google Chrome Portable to (hopefully) prevent Google from identifying your personal browser copy:

"client_id": "FA7069F6-ACF8-4E92-805E-2AEBC67F45E0",
"client_id_timestamp": "1220449017",

And now finally enjoy your privacy-enhanced Google Chrome browser! :)

Unfortunately there's no guarantee that Google hasn't hidden even more spying features in this otherwise pretty neat little browser.

Run Applications Faster in Wine

If you run wine like this

env WINEDEBUG=-all wine

it's a bit faster, because the debugging is turned off.

µTorrent with Wine under Linux

uTorrent, or µTorrent is a very small and leightweight but full-featured bittorrent client. Unfortunately it's for Windows only. But fortunately it works great in wine.

Here's a little script to let you pass .torrent files comfortably over command line. I've got the same type of script for WordViewer and other software. Hopefully this will sometime soon by handled by wine directly.

#!/bin/sh

WINE="env WINEDEBUG=-all wine"
UTORRENT="C:\Programme\uTorrent\uTorrent.exe"

if [ "$@" ]; then arg="z:`echo $@ | sed -e 's/\//\\\\/g'`"; fi

echo $arg > ~/logs/tmp

if [ "$@" ];
then
$WINE "$UTORRENT" "$arg" >> /dev/null 2>> /dev/null &
else
$WINE "$UTORRENT" >> /dev/null 2>> /dev/null &
fi

Wine is called without debugging to save more resources. The argument is converted to a pathname that wine can handle better ("/" are converted to "\"). You probably need to adjust the path where uTorrent is saved.