Troubleshooting / Reporting bugs What to do if some program still doesn't work ? There are times when you've been trying everything, you even killed a cat at full moon and ate it with rotten garlic and foul fish while doing the Devil's Dance, yet nothing helped to make some damn program work on some Wine version. Don't despair, we're here to help you... (in other words: how much do you want to pay ?) Run "winecheck" to check your configuration Run a Perl script called winecheck, to be found in Wine's tools/ directory. The latest version can always be found at http://home.arcor.de/andi.mohr/download/winecheck. Make sure to run chmod +x winecheck first before trying to execute it... (or alternatively run it via perl ./winecheck) The winecheck output will be a percentage score indicating Wine configuration correctness. Note that winecheck is only alpha, so it's not very complete or 100% accurate. Use different windows version settings In several cases using different windows version settings can help. Use different startup paths This sometimes helps, too: Try to use both wine prg.exe and wine x:\\full\\path\\to\\prg.exe Fiddle with DLL configuration Run with --debugmsg +loaddll to figure out which DLLs are being used, and whether they're being loaded as native or builtin. Then make sure you have proper native DLL files in your configured C:\windows\system directory and fiddle with DLL load order settings at command line or in config file. Check your system environment ! Just an idea: could it be that your Wine build/execution environment is broken ? Make sure that there are no problems whatsoever with the packages that Wine depends on (gcc, glibc, X libraries, OpenGL (!), ...) E.g. some people have strange failures to find stuff when using "wrong" header files for the "right" libraries !!! (which results in days of debugging to desperately try to find out why that lowlevel function fails in a way that is completely beyond imagination... ARGH !) Use different GUI (Window Manager) modes Instruct Wine via config file to use either desktop mode, managed mode or plain ugly "normal" mode. That can make one hell of a difference, too. Check your app ! Maybe your app is using some kind of copy protection ? Many copy protections currently don't work on Wine. Some might work in the future, though. (the CD-ROM layer isn't really full-featured yet). Go to GameCopyWorld and try to find a decent crack for your game that gets rid of that ugly copy protection. I hope you do have a legal copy of the program, though... :-) Check your Wine environment ! Running with or without a Windows partition can have a dramatic impact. Configure Wine to do the opposite of what you used to have. Also, install DCOM98 or DCOM95. This can be very beneficial. Reconfigure Wine Sometimes wine installation process changes and new versions of Wine acccount on these changes. This is especially true if your setup was created long time ago. Rename your existing ~/.wine directory for backup purposes. Use the setup process that's recommended for your Wine distribution to create new configuration. Use information in old ~/.wine directory as a reference. For source wine distribution to configure Wine run tools/wineinstall script as a user you want to do the configuration for. This is a pretty safe operation. Later you can remove the new ~/.wine directory and rename your old one back. Check out further information Check out the Wine Troubleshooting Guide on WineHQ. Go to Google Groups and check whether some guys are smarter than you ;-) (well, whether they found a solution to the problem, that is) Go to WineHQ's Application Database and check whether someone posted the vital config hint for your app. If that doesn't help, then consider going to irc.openprojects.net channel #WineHQ, posting to news:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine or mailing to the wine-users (or maybe sometimes even wine-devel) mailing lists. Debug it! Have you used the Search feature of the Wine Troubleshooting Guide ?? (i.e. are you sure there's no answer ?) If you have, then try The Perfect Enduser Wine Debugging Guide, and of course don't forget to read the Wine Developers Guide. How To Report A Bug Written by (???) (Originally extracted from wine/documentation/bugreports) There are two ways for you to make a bug report. One uses a simple perl script, and is recommended if you don't want to spend a lot of time producing the report. It is designed for use by just about anyone, from the newest of newbies to advanced developers. You can also make a bug report the hard way -- advanced developers will probably prefer this. When using either approach please report the problem you found along with any relevant information to Wine Bugzilla. The Easy Way Your computer must have perl on it for this method to work. To find out if you have perl, run which perl. If it returns something like /usr/bin/perl, you're in business. Otherwise, skip on down to "The Hard Way". If you aren't sure, just keep on going. When you try to run the script, it will become very apparent if you don't have perl. Change directory to <dirs to wine>/tools Type in ./bug_report.pl and follow the directions. Post the bug to Wine Bugzilla. Please, search Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is already found before posting a bug report. Include your own detailed description of the problem with relevant information. Attach the "Nice Formatted Report" to the submitted bug. Do not cut and paste the report in the bug description - it is pretty big. Keep the full debug output in case it will be needed by Wine developers. The Hard Way Some simple advice on making your bug report more useful (and thus more likely to get answered and fixed): Post as much information as possible. This means we need more information than a simple "MS Word crashes whenever I run it. Do you know why?" Include at least the following information: Version of Wine you're using (run wine -v) Operating system you're using, what distribution (if any), and what version Compiler and version (run gcc -v) Windows version, if used with Wine. Mention if you don't use Windows Program you're trying to run, its version number, and a URL for where the program can be obtained (if available) Command line you used to start wine Any other information you think may be relevant or helpful, such as X server version in case of X problems, libc version etc. Re-run the program with the --debugmsg +relay option (i.e., wine --debugmsg +relay sol.exe). If Wine crashes while running your program, it is important that we have this information to have a chance at figuring out what is causing the crash. This can put out quite a lot (several MB) of information, though, so it's best to output it to a file. When the Wine-dbg> prompt appears, type quit. You might want to try +relay,+snoop instead of +relay, but please note that +snoop is pretty unstable and often will crash earlier than a simple +relay! If this is the case, then please use only +relay!! A bug report with a crash in +snoop code is useless in most cases! You can also turn on other parameters, depending on the nature of the problem you are researching. See wine man page for full list of the parameters. To get the trace output, use the following commands: all shells: $ echo quit | wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name >& filename.out; $ tail -n 100 filename.out > report_file (This will print wine's debug messages only to the file and then auto-quit. It's probably a good idea to use this command, since wine prints out so many debug msgs that they flood the terminal, eating CPU.) tcsh and other csh-like shells: $ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name |& tee filename.out; $ tail -100 filename.out > report_file bash and other sh-like shells: $ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name 2>&1 | tee filename.out; $ tail -100 filename.out > report_file report_file will now contain the last hundred lines of the debugging output, including the register dump and backtrace, which are the most important pieces of information. Please do not delete this part, even if you don't understand what it means. Post the bug to Wine Bugzilla. Please, search the Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is already reported. If it is already reported attach the bug report and add any other relevant information to the original bug report. In your post, include all of the information from part 1), and attach to the bug the output file in part 2). If you do this, your chances of receiving some sort of helpful response should be very good.