[thechat] Wine Whine

[Luther, Ron]

Hi Folks!


Having much fun 'sploring the apps on me shiny new (and yet partially bricked) dual boot Ubuntu Studio / Windows XP laptop.

Making some progress:
* Managed to mangle my way through using alsamixer from a terminal window to mute the external speaker while still allowing me to listen to Audacious and play with other things (like the ZynAddSubFX Software synthesizer) through headphones.

Still stuck on a few things:
* How the <blankety-blank> do you resize these dadgum teeny-tiny application windows?   Grrrrr!


But still one or two major boojums somewhat preventing this thing from being pronounced fully 'fit for use'.

I've got some CDs from these folks: http://www.riffinteractive.com/  The widget-y thing gives a rough approximation of what their stuff looks like.  (Yeah, the daily freebie stuff can be a bit lame.  However, things like the non-free 'in the style of Billy Gibbons' disk are a lot of fun!)

I think this stuff runs as Active-X junk.  I'd like to run these disks on my shiny new boxen.

(1) I can boot the new box into Ubuntu Studio.  I don't know if it would work (or how to use it) but I don't see "wine" listed as an application anywhere.  (Is it worth trying to download a tar file on some other machine, sneakernetting it over to this thing and trying to unfold/spindle/mutilate it?)

(2) The Windows XP boot is pretty crippled.  The machine comes up looking for a 'log on to the network' user name and password.  I have the old user name, but that user has retired.  So the password is gone and the machine (being old enough to be no longer supported) doesn't seem to like valid combinations that work for me on other machines on the network.  If someone can explain to me (baby steps) how to crack this puppy open and let me run XP locally/natively -- then that would work too since I could run the CDs once I boot into XP.


Any hints, tux-side or Redmond-side, will be wilkommen!

Danke Schoen,
RonL.