Wine System and Utilities

From Wine-Wiki

If you are trialing or using Wine, please add the software to the Wine Application Database and do feel free to add a wiki page to detail and share your insights, trials and efforts with others. While the Wine Database is the official source of information; if you do not have all the answers, and maybe a few questions, this is where wiki can shine and complement the database (not compete) - by allowing a diverse group of both experienced and inexperienced users to freely build, share and collate their hard won knowledge.

If you are currently a maintainer for Software with the Official Wine Application Database, you are welcome to add any information found in this wiki. We will endeavour to always link to software in the official database and maintainers are also welcome to add a link to this wiki.

How to make an entry in the wiki

You can add an entry on this page like this [[My program's name]]

Then when you click Show Preview you will recognise the name is in Red. A red entry, is a link to a blank page. If you save the page and then click on the name, a new page is created for you and the original link will change to a blue colour.

Are there any tips for writing a page?
Yes, there is a couple of features of wiki's that may take a little getting used to.

The first is that anyone can change your page! This is a little unsettling at first, but when you realize the people who change it are trying to add their tips and hard won knowledge, you may start to see the power of the wiki. If everyone gives a little coin, eventually you will have a treasure.
When writing, the wiki will remove one blank line.

You can see this if you click the edit tab for this page. This line is actually written across two lines! The wiki has removed it. When you wish to make a paragraph, you will need to make two blank lines.

like so.(click edit to have a look - Click Cancel when you are finished)

What to type on a new page?

Likely you will want to add an introduction, so type =introduction= , add a few brief notes and then click Show Preview

What if I dont like what I wrote?

That is the beauty of a wiki - just change it, or leave it and someone else will. To work out how to use formatting, find a page in the wiki which looks like what you want, and click on any edit link or tab and see how they did it... (This page has a number of formatting tricks - feel free to have a little peek behind the scenes)

When adding to this page, when do I call it Wine [program] or just [program]

If it runs without requiring wine before it, like notepad or regedit, usually we would add it on it's own. But you need to specify wine such as with wine start, you probably would add it under wine start.

Table of contents : A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

B

Bordeaux

C

D

dosdevices

dxdiag.exe: This is now needed by some games. However Wine 1.1.29 changelog noted dxdiag: Add stub implementation.

D. Kegel started a discussion on the list. S. Dossenger [Dec 08]: Prints DLL information, has very simple tests for ddraw, d3d, dsound, dmusic, dplay. The tests just show that a device can be created and a cube can be rendered. This could detect if the opengl libs are missing, but it won't be able to tell direct rendering from indirect rendering. (really dxdiag can't say so via the win32 API).

D. Kegel: Can you list the main Win32 API calls you'd like such an app to use to retrieve information?

H. Verbeet: For d3d9 that would probably be IDirect3D9::CheckDeviceFormat(), IDirect3D9::CheckDeviceMultiSampleType(), IDirect3D9::EnumAdapterModes(), IDirect3D9::GetAdapterIdentifier() and IDirect3D9::GetDeviceCaps(). Ddraw and d3d8 should have similar methods, I'm not completely sure about dxgi/d3d10.

For OpenGL there's DescribePixelFormat(), and glGetString() with various constants like GLRENDERER, GL_VENDOR, GL_VERSION and GL_EXTENSIONS. Limits are usually retrieved with glGetIntegerv() or glGetFloatv() and an appropriate constant.

D. Riekenberg: in addition to the DX7, DX8 and DX9 rendering tests, we could add

OpenGL rendering test
GDI32 rendering test
DX10 rendering test
the framerate for all rendering tests

D. Kegel: should we change Wine so that the true card's info is reported by native dxdiag?

S. Dossinger: Concerning this topic, there are some apps that try to load the nvidia/ati specific driver files, and have vendor specific strings. City of Heroes tried to find nvogl.dll(or similar, don't remember exactly). I don't know what it tried to do with it, but this could potentially be a bigger problem than just a string in dxdiag.

Roderick: Most likely it attempted to load the OpenGL ICD driver directly and that way avoid using opengl32.dll / gdi32.dll.

Lois previously worked a bit on this: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14118

http://kegel.com/wine/sweng/2009/ page by D. Kegel about dxdiag

dxdiagn D. Kegel asked at the end of 2008: Markus, what's the status of dxdiagn these days? I see a number of games that say they need a native copy: http://www.google.com/search?q=dxdiagn+site%3Aappdb.winehq.org Do you know what needs doing before we can get native dxdiag working, http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429 ? Also, how about your dxdiagn conformance test?

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-May/055355.html I know it didn't do much, maybe you could have it check a few required properties?

Markus wrote Jan 09 [wine devel] I have not worked on dxdiagn for a few months due to a lack of time. As far as missing functionality is concerned, I have only investigated properties related to the display container. I suspect that many games are trying to read the b3DAccelerationExists and/or b3DAccelerationEnabled properties in it to determine if 3D acceleration is available. However, compared to dx9, there are more than 45 other properties missing for this container alone, so there is still a lot of work left to be done. In order to reach support for the two acceleration properties, I have just submitted an updated patch based on my code from mid-2008: http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2009-January/066929.html I will try to re-submit the test case in the next days depending on my time.

dxcapsviewer.exe:S. Dossenger [Dec 08] This app lists all the capability flags advertised for ddraw, d3d8, dsound, etc. It is part of the dx sdk, but I don't see a problem with implementing it. Sooner or later we'll clone other tools from the dx sdk too, like vsa.exe, psa.exe and fxc.exe(shader assemblers and compiler) Another feature idea is to enable ddraw, d3d8 and d3d9 to import a capability flag dump from dxcapsviewer to advertise exactly the same flags as on Windows. This can help to debug capability flag problems.

M

Msiexec

N

Notepad

P

PATH

pixwin.exe S. Dossenger [Dec 08] is interesting too. It allows to record something similar to a +d3d9 trace on Windows, and save it for playback. The native version currently doesn't work on wine, but I think it is fixable. A similar tool could be useful to (1) see if a log recorded on windows produces the same output on Wine, and (2) to see if a windows app performs the same calls on Wine as it does on Windows(to detect caps problems for example)