As the sub-title suggests, it never occurred to me that PlayOnLinux had a forum because my experience was "Hey! PlayOnLinux! THAT sounds cool!" and I installed it as an apt package in Ubuntu 20.04 and then just installed the handful of Windows programs I wanted to run in it, and I was off to the races, and never had to look back. "Seamless" I think that's called. (As I recall I had one wrinkle with one install, but it threw an error that gave me a clue about which additional library, or whatever-it-was, was needed and it was quickly fixed.)
I'm a registered owner of MeshCAM5, which is computer-aided-machining/CAM software for making CNC G-code from solid models, and I used to run it with wine from way back before discovering virtual machines and running it inside Windows VMs. However compared to those, POL has been a walk in the park, it's so straightforward.
And as the Title says, "It used to work!" I have two similar machines: both were running Ubuntu 20.04. I upgraded the first to 22.04 and it hiccupped in the install and gave me a week of reconstructive headaches, but it's back up and running, and I have POL installed on it, and the 64-bit MeshCAM5 installed in it in its own virtual drive with nothing special required--as I recall. The upgrade of the second machine to Ubuntu 22.04 went smoothly, and I installed POL and MeshCAM5 inside of its own virtual drive inside that, and it too worked, until it didn't. And forgive me here, I've tried fixes and now forgotten details of the fail because I am old and I have anyway uninstalled and re-installed the POL apt pkg in an attempt to "start fresh."
Attempts to install the setup file (MeshCAM5-Setup-build45_64b.exe) on the second machine fail with an error:
Error in POL_Wine | Wine seems to have crashed | If your program is running, just ignore this message
The command-line output has a more important clue, although not labeled as an Error or Warning:
it looks like wine32-development is missing, you should install it.
as root, please execute "apt-get install wine32-development"
Fair enough, but the attempt to install it is answered with:
Package wine32-development is not available, but is referred to by another package.
...
However the following packages replace it: | libwine-development
E: Package 'wine32-development' has no installation candidate
However, sudo apt install libwine-development returns:
libwine-development is already the newest version (6.0+repack-1ubuntu1).
Catch-22. It seems Ubuntu 22.04 "knows" that "wine32-development" requirements are covered by "libwine-development" (I noted a similar relationship between "libwine" and "wine32"), but POL doesn't know about that and "makes calls" (I'm guessing here) for the former which the OS then fails to redirect. (Maybe?)
However, what ultimately DID work was tarring up and gzipping the ~/.PlayOnLinux/ directory on the working machine, scping it over to the second and recreating it on the second machine.[1]
The obviously preferable solution would be to understand why the ordinary approach of installing POL and MeshCAM5 has not worked, and address that.
The question the is:
How to go about investigating differences between a working POL-application install on one machine in order to ensure the same installation choices are made on another?
Thanks for any insights you can give.
[1] Incidentally, 'machine1% scp -r ~/.PlayOnLinux machine2:~' failed spectacularly because, I learned, scp FOLLOWS symbolic links, with no way I could find to disable that behavior.
Edited by PlagueOnLinux
