2.3 VEGA ZZ installation on Linux with Wine
2.3.1 Introduction
2.3.2 What's you need
2.3.3 Wine installation
2.3.4 JRE installation
2.3.5 VEGA ZZ installation
2.3.6 What is not working
Wine is a program loader able to run Windows applications on Linux, MacOS and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop. At this time, Wine is under development and it's not yet suitable for general use, although it can run VEGA ZZ with some limits. VEGA ZZ detects Wine and enable some "hacks" especially for OpenGL routines due to the impossibility to perform the OpenGL rendering in sub-windows (for more details, http://wiki.winehq.org/OpenGL). This "hack" copies the OpenGL buffer to the correct sub-window but the approach reduces the overall graphic performances because it's supported only by the software rendering mode.
To perform the Wine installation, follow the instructions at http://www.winehq.org/download/epel/. CentOS 4 and Scientific Linux 5 distributions seem unable to install Wine through yum (e.g. yum install wine). To overcame this problem, download manually all Wine packages from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/, choosing the more suitable distribution version. To install each single package, type in the command shell:
rpm -i wine-package-version.rpm
where package is the sub-package name and version is the release version. If you want check if Wine is already installed, type:
rpm -qa | grep wine
If you want remove an old Wine installation:
rpm -e wine-package-version.rpm
To check if the installation is ok, you can type in the command shell:
winecfg
The Wine configuration utility will be shown and the default configuration files will be created.
The Java Runtime Environment is needed to run applets inside the Web browser (e.g. SketchEl). As first step, you need to check if your browser is able to run applets, connecting to http://www.java.com and performing the on-line test. If the test result is positive, you can skip this section, otherwise you need to follow these steps that are for Linux (RedHat-like distributions) and Firefox:
chmod 755 jre-*.bin
./jre-*.binand wait the end of the installation.
ln -s /usr/java/jre<jre_version>/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ ln -s /usr/java/jre<jre_version>/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox-<firefox_version>/plugins/where <jre_version_jre> and <version_firefox> are respectively the JRE and Firefox version numbers. If you don't know your Firefox version, type:
firefox -v
The VEGA ZZ installation in Wine is quite similar to the standard Windows installation.
wine Vega_ZZ_X.Y.Z_Win32.exewhere X.Y.Z is the package version. Please remember to type the full package path if the setup file isn't in the current directory.
vegazzIf you want to disable the software rendering to increase the OpenGL performances:
vegazz_fastIf the test is positive, you can remove the vegazz symbolic link and create a new one pointing to vegazz_fast (the default link is on vegazz_safe).
WARNING:
if you have already installed VEGA command line for Linux, you can uninstall it
because the setup install automatically in the "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program
Files/VEGA ZZ/Linux" the Linux ELF native executables in order to avoid
the problem of the VEGADIR and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables (see
Linux/Unix installation).
Unluckily, Wine is unable to emulate all Windows features required by VEGA ZZ and thus some capabilities are missing or not full working: