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Hi,
first of all thx for the nice work on this app, this is the first time i managed to get something working with wine.

Anyways i'd like to know if and how you can configure a manual installation (unsupported application).

- 1 - Wine versions

My first idea was to understand how PoL manages to run various wine versions for its applications (or prefixes ?), so if you can tell me about that i'd appreciate it.
I understand that installing a specific wine version in pol for a wineprefix and using the following command in a terminal would not be enough :
WINEPREFIX=~/.Playonlinux/wineprefix/myprefix wine /path/to/myapp

calling "wine" from a terminal will always use the "system" wine, installed on the distro (wine 1.3.15 ubuntu natty here), right ?

i'm a bit confused to see that winecfg "about" tab always shows my system version and that the wine binaries in windows/system32/ are always the same too no matter which pol prefix i'm looking at, but i don't know if those binaries are relevant.

- 2 - app directory
Then after "installing" my game and creating a shortcut in pol, that game won't run because it is not launched from its root directory. Using a terminal and going to the game root directory works if i specify a correct WINEPREFIX=.., but i suspect using wine on the command line, outside pol interface renders pol settings useless.
The game installer being known to be broken, it is advised to do a windows install and then use the extracted files with wine, and that works as long as you change to the root dir of the app when calling wine.
So how do i tell pol to switch to that directory to execute a pol shortcut ?


I do know bash scripting and i've tried to browse pol script documentation but i fail to understand if those scripts are only used to install programs or if they can be used to run pol shortcuts.

I'll probably try to play with some script but if you could point me in the correct direction it would
certainly help me save some time, and as always any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,
first of all thx for the nice work on this app, this is the first time i managed to get something working with wine.

Thank you :) It's a pleasure for us

Anyways i'd like to know if and how you can configure a manual installation (unsupported application).

- 1 - Wine versions

My first idea was to understand how PoL manages to run various wine versions for its applications (or prefixes ?), so if you can tell me about that i'd appreciate it.
I understand that installing a specific wine version in pol for a wineprefix and using the following command in a terminal would not be enough :
WINEPREFIX=~/.Playonlinux/wineprefix/myprefix wine /path/to/myapp

calling "wine" from a terminal will always use the "system" wine, installed on the distro (wine 1.3.15 ubuntu natty here), right ?

The wine versions are not associated with a prefix. They are associated with a shortcut. The shortcut are small bash scripts, stored in .PlayOnLinux/configurations/installed. If wine 1.3.15 is assigned, you will see at the first line :
export PATH="/path/to/wine/1.3.15:$PATH"

Then, POL will use this wineversion to run the program. Wine version are stored in .PlayOnLinux/WineVersions

i'm a bit confused to see that winecfg "about" tab always shows my system version and that the wine binaries in windows/system32/ are always the same too no matter which pol prefix i'm looking at, but i don't know if those binaries are relevant.

It depends how winecfg is run. If you use :
export PATH="/path/to/wine/:$PATH"
wine winecfg
Then, you'll see the good version

- 2 - app directory
Then after "installing" my game and creating a shortcut in pol, that game won't run because it is not launched from its root directory. Using a terminal and going to the game root directory works if i specify a correct WINEPREFIX=.., but i suspect using wine on the command line, outside pol interface renders pol settings useless.

There will be no difference, except that you'll not use the specific wineversions. You can edit POL shortcut to correct your problem

The game installer being known to be broken, it is advised to do a windows install and then use the extracted files with wine, and that works as long as you change to the root dir of the app when calling wine.
So how do i tell pol to switch to that directory to execute a pol shortcut ?

Just edit the file in configurations/installed directory

I do know bash scripting and i've tried to browse pol script documentation but i fail to understand if those scripts are only used to install programs or if they can be used to run pol shortcuts.

They are used for everything : Installing the program, asking question to the user, setting the best wineversion, choosing the prefix ...

I'll probably try to play with some script but if you could point me in the correct direction it would
certainly help me save some time, and as always any help would be greatly appreciated.

First, read those pages (http://www.playonmac.com/en/page-2-Documentation.html) if it's not done, (they might not be really up-to-date, but it could help you to understand our framework)
Then, the best is to read existing scripts, for example this one : http://www.playonmac.com/repository/?script=680

Thank you !

Edited by Tinou

thx for the quick reply

The wine versions are not associated with a prefix. They are associated with a shortcut. The shortcut are small bash scripts, stored in .PlayOnLinux/configurations/installed.

that's exactly what i needed, i modified the shortcut script and it works fine now.

A quick word on the original shortcut created by your app.
The script did have a "cd /path/to/exe" command but it was faulty, as follows :

i hand picked the path to the game exe during the installation procedure, which is outside drive_c.
cd "/home/user/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/someprefix/drive_c//full/path/to/gamedir"
and although the cd command would fail, the following wine command would not take advantage of the preceding directory change by using the full path again, like this :

wine "/full/path/to/gamedir/game.exe"
So maybe that could be addressed to make shortcuts less troublesome in some cases.


I also managed to run a pol script from the pol shell but of course shortcuts are handy.
It gave me the opportunity to learn to set wine's version before running the exe through PoL commands.

So thx again for the help, i'm quite sure i'll keep using this very nice framework for my daily wine needs.