Windows Icons in WINE

Using WINE apps under the menu is OK with that weird spring “Launcher” icon but it’s good to have old icons you are familiar with.

I found a post on the excellent Ubuntu forums dealing with problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6915531#post6915531

Coincidently, the output of  wrestool -x –output=. -t14 ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/MSN\ Messenger/msnmsgr.exe …leaves you with a .ico file which you will then have to convert to a SVG (vector based format) to use in Ubuntu’s menu

I went a slightly different route by using http://wineicons.sourceforge.net/ to extract the icon from the exe as a PNG Bear in mind that the “Change Icon” dialog will not show the icons in the directory that you navigate to. Click OK and then the dialog will ask you to select from the compatible files it find in the directory (confused me for about an hour!)

Wine continued

We have many volunteers here and I want using Ubuntu to be easy to switch over to. Most of their time will be spent using Mp3direct cut running in WINE. The GNU/Linux filesystem will be alien to them, therefore I wanted the directories they need to access mapped to Drive letters so they called simply navigate to “My Computer”.

Unfortunately there is a problem with the WINE configuration utility that means that it is not able to write the user-defined labels to the mapped drives (labeling is under the “Show Advance” option under the Drives tab).

You can easily get around this by simply placing a text file called .windows-label in the root of the drives/directories you wish to label, with just your alpahnumeric label in it.

Corked Wine – Moving the Studio Over

I’m currently moving the Resonance computers over to Ubuntu. We have a variety of elderly P.Cs and this is throwing up a fair amount of annoying but not insurmountable problems.

Today it’s the turn of Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux (as quoted in the Add/Remove dialog). I’m only really installing it for one application, the excellent Mp3directcut (I’ve yet to find a similar replacement for GNU/Linux)

The problem I’m having is that Wine’s fonts are completely garbled even in the native program itself! Fortunately the very active Ubuntu forums have an anwser:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6530843

A longer discussion of the problem can be found on Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-96/+bug/300476