Category: Wine

Documenting Technically

digitaleagle Jethro List, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office365, Open Office, Uncategorized Leave a comment

Many times, I find that I need to create a document that includes either code or output from a command-line.  I haven’t found that either LibreOffice or Microsoft Word provide good styling to make that code or output look nice in a technical document.  Below is how I created some Paragraph styles in both programs to display the code.  I would love feed back on how I can improve the look.  Please Comment Below.

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Game: Spiritual Warfare

digitaleagle Games, Games, Uncategorized, Wine Leave a comment

As a kid, I played this game called Spiritual Warfare.  I’m not sure if it was a gift or if it was something that we got at the Christian bookstore.  Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun.  I don’t remember that much of it, but I do remember some of the hymns that played in the background during the game play.

Spiritual Warfare Title Screen

I found that you can still purchase the game online.  I thought my son would enjoy it, plus it would be a good challenge to get it to work in Linux.  Here’s the website:

Note:  I had a little issue with my order, and it took over a month to arrive.  I think I caught the company at a bad time when staff was working through some form of personal emergency compounded by some shipping issues.  They made up for it by providing another game, which I will have to blog about when I get a chance to try to get it working.

Installing Wine

The game came on a CD with a Windows installer.  The game itself is a DOS game, but the installer requires Windows.  I used Wine to run the installer.  In actuality, since Windows is not required for running the game, I could have used a VM or a friend’s computer.

I added the latest Wine repository and installed Wine with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.6

This installed the Wine version 1.6.  On my laptop, I tried it first with version 1.7, and that did not work at all.  Apparently, there is a bug out there between the latest kernel, Wine, and 16-bit applications.  It gave me this error on my laptop:

err:module:attach_process_dlls "krnl386.exe16" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winevdm.exe" failed, status c0000005

I went to my other laptop, and the 1.6 version worked fine.

I created a separate Wine prefix for this install.  I think the 32-bit part was important (WINEARCH=win32).

mkdir .wineprefixes
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare
export WINEARCH=win32

I ran winecfg to create the Wineprefix, although that wasn’t necessary.  The only thing that I did was to select Windows 98 for the Windows version.

To start the installation, I ran:

wine cmd
d:
setup.exe

Actually, the CD wouldn’t work in the other computer.  I had no problem copying the install files off the CD on my laptop and transfering them over the network to the other computer.  You can just launch setup.exe from any location where you have the install files.

wine setup.exe

I basically accepted the defaults for the install.  This installed the game into C:\SPIRIT, which considering Linux and the Wine prefix, that would be $HOME/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c/SPIRIT.

DosBox

Wine will not run the game itself because it is actually a DOS-based game.  So, I installed DosBox with this command:

sudo apt-get install dosbox

Then, after starting DosBox, and I had to do a couple of things to get it to run.   First, you have to mount the C: drive to get access to the executable:

mount c .wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c

Then, you can just launch it like you would in DOS:

C:
cd \SPIRIT
spirit.exe

At first, the game was a little fast.  I learned that you can slow it down with the Ctrl + F11 sequence.  (You can speed it back up with Ctrl + F12).  Then, you can go to full screen mode.

Shortcut

Now, my son is not going to enter a mount command and go through all of that.  (If it was the only way he could play the game, I’m sure he would learn how!)  I found that I could create a custom configuration file just for the game.  I copied the default one:

cp $HOME/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf $HOME/.dosbox/spiritualwarfare.conf

Then, I edited my copy.  I changed:

  • fullscreen=true
  • cycles=768 (under [cpu] )
  • The [autoexec] section

At the end, the lines I put in autoexec where:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
mount c ~/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c
c:
cd SPIRIT
spirit
exit

Finally, I made a shortcut with the “Menu Editor” program (alacarte), and I entered the command:

dosbox -conf $HOME/.dosbox/spiritualwarfare.conf

Game Play

In the installation directory, there is a readme.txt file with some helpful information to playing the game.  You’ll probably want to go through that.  Just to help, here are the keys to use:

Arrow Keys – Control the hero
Space Bar – Makes the hero throw fruit
Tab – Makes the hero drop a vial or throw the jawbone or the sword
Pause or F10 – Pauses the game

1 – Select Pear
2 – Select Apple
3 – Select Pomegranate
4 – Select Grapes
5 – Select Banana

P – Pray
M – Bring up the map
V – Select Vial of God’s Wrath
S – Select Sword of the Spirit
J – Select Samson’s Jawbone
R – Select the Raft
T – Light the Torch
A – Use Anointing Oil

F1 – Options Menu
F2 – Load Game
F3 – Save Game
F4 – Sound Menu
F5 – Game Speed Menu

ESC – Quit Game or Clear Menu

Other than that, just explore.  Keep looking for things to get.  It’s a lot of fun.

Playing Spiritual Warfare

Resources

Microsoft Outlook on Linux

digitaleagle Microsoft Office, Uncategorized, Wine Leave a comment

I’ve been using Word and Excel on my Ubuntu for a while now.  For the most part, it works pretty good.  Just recently, someone asked me about how Outlook worked.

My personal preference is GMail.  I like the interface, and I like having my mail in the cloud.  When I refresh my computer, it’s one less thing to have to backup.  For a while, I did use Thunderbird.  It works natively on Linux.  Still, I’ll explore Outlook for a second.

For the instructions on installing Office, you can see my post: Ubuntu 12.04: Office and Play on Linux

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Traffic Travis on Linux

digitaleagle Uncategorized, Wine 2 Comments

Recently, a friend told me about this program called Traffic Travis that could help with SEO.  It has some free features and you can pay for PRO features.  Since it had a free version, I decided to try to see if I could get it running under Linux.

Here’s the description from Traffic Travis:

Best Free SEO Software for all your SEO & PPC Management needs. Use Traffic Travis for both on and off page analysis as well as spying on your competitors.

Traffic Travis doesn’t support Linux as far as I could see, so this is an exercise in Wine.  Here’s what I did to get it installed:

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Ubuntu 12.04: Office and Play on Linux

digitaleagle Microsoft Office, Ubuntu, Uncategorized 3 Comments

One the requirements for my laptop is to be able to edit Microsoft Office documents.  LibreOffice works quite well and was installed by default, but when exchanging complex documents with other Office users, Microsoft Office has no substitute.

So, my solution is to run Office using wine.  I have used winetricks in the past to install Linux, but that didn’t work this time.  This time a project called Play on Linux came through for me.

Here’s what I did…

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Installing MS Office on Ubuntu 11.10

digitaleagle Microsoft Office, Uncategorized, Wine 6 Comments

To exist in a world dominated by Microsoft products, you have to be able to coexist with others using those products.  That includes connecting to shares via Samba, using remote desktop, and opening Office documents.  When it comes to office documents, Libre Office does the job for the most part.  I have had pretty good success using Libre Office even with Microsoft Office files.  The problem comes when you bounce a document back and forth between Libre Office and Microsoft Office.

If you are working in a team with other Microsoft Office users, you are going to have to break down and install Microsoft Office.  Below you will see the screenshots of how I installed Office.  At the end, you can find other methods.

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Installing MS Office on Fedora 15 — try 2

digitaleagle Fedora, How To, Microsoft Office, Uncategorized, Wine 4 Comments

This is my second attempt at writing this article.  Office hasn’t been playing nicely with Fedora, but I finally have it working!  This How-To is not as clean as I would like, but it works.

First, let’s explore the motivation for installing Microsoft Office on Linux.  I would venture to guess that most if not all Linux distributions have LibreOffice in their repositories.  That is a full-featured office package that will probably do most of what you want.  In my opinion, Microsoft Office is just a little bit better, but that comes with a huge price tag!  The value is definitely on LibreOffice’s side.  But, here are some reasons you may consider Office instead:

  • if you can get Office cheaper — many times you can get Office much cheaper through student licensing or corporate licensing
  • if you do a lot of work on Office documents in conjunction with other Microsoft users — LibreOffice can open, edit, and save MS Office documents, but when you go back and forth, you will probably have to constantly fix small formatting issues

My motivation comes from working with textbooks.  I was working with large Word documents, and since they were so large, reformatting images and screenshots were not feasible every time we passed them back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office.  Plus, Office was bought for me so the cost was not an issue!
So, with no further adue, let me walk you through what I did to install it on my Fedora 15 OS:

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Installing Microsoft Office 2007 on Fedora 15

digitaleagle Fedora, Microsoft Office, Uncategorized, Wine 10 Comments

I needed to install Microsoft Office 2007 on my Fedora 15 installation, and my first step was to look for a tutorial that might help clear up any gotchas before I hit them. Unfortunately, the closest I found was these two articles:

So, my thought was to create my own how to.  Instead, I think I have created more of a how NOT to!  By the time I was done with all of this, it didn’t work.  So, don’t bother with this article if you are trying to figure out how to make it work.  If you are looking on something to develop to make the world better for Linux users, look no more.  We need help!

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