Tinycore and WINE

[Rime]

I've been looking recently for a Linux kernel that can run some of my old DOS/Windows games and someone pointed me in this direction.  Although Tinycore looks quite promising and beautifully lightweight, I've been having some trouble getting WINE to run properly.

When I first configure WINE, it will set up a virtual C: drive in the /home directory.  This represents a problem because a game like Diablo 2 is over 1GB, but I only have 3 128MB sticks on which to install it.  Most Windows games do not simply want a FAT32 in which to install themselves, they want that C: drive

I see two options for using Tinycore and WINE.  One, install scattermode so WINE can set up a C: drive somewhere other than RAM.  Or two, Create a /home directory on my hard drive so WINE can set up its virtual drive "properly."

Although option 2 is likely the easier one, I'm unfamiliar with trying to set up the /home directory somewhere other than the default location.  Are there some links, etc that can be provided so I can figure out how to do this?

[^thehatsrule^]

One would use the home=<partition> boot option for a persistent home.  Boot options are listed on F2/F3 on a livecd boot prompt and the wiki.

I see some alternatives to your idea though:
- if you want to have just the wine settings to be persistent, you could link ~/.wine to somewhere else on your hard drive (i.e. `ln -s /some/path ~/.wine` ) [same as the above post]
- you could set up wine to have a drive on somewhere else (i.e. `winecfg`)

[Rime]

I've tried moving my /.wine folder to my /mnt/hda5 partition and then creating a symlink to that folder to my /home directory.  It sounded like a great idea, but it does not appear to work.  

I may try a few more times to see if there's something I've done wrong with this method, but it appears that even after I back up Tinycore, my apps aren't being restored, so I'll poke around for that as well.

I may hop over to winehq to look into setting up an alternate drive, I'm unfamiliar with the configuring drives under the Drives tab as well as being quite a newb to Linux, but I'm sure that with some reading I can figure out if that's possible.  Or I can check out that boot option, which I think would also work.

Thanks.

[danielibarnes]

I've tried moving my /.wine folder to my /mnt/hda5 partition and then creating a symlink to that folder to my /home directory.  It sounded like a great idea, but it does not appear to work.

I symlinked my drive_c directory and that worked for me. I even used "mount -o bind" with success. The drives tab of winecfg is probably the preferred method.

Starcraft runs really well on Wine. I am making an extension for it so that I can have a Starcraft "Live CD" or put it on a usb drive and have Starcraft-on-a-stick.

[^thehatsrule^]

I've tried moving my /.wine folder to my /mnt/hda5 partition and then creating a symlink to that folder to my /home directory.  It sounded like a great idea, but it does not appear to work.

What were your commands, and what went wrong?

I may try a few more times to see if there's something I've done wrong with this method, but it appears that even after I back up Tinycore, my apps aren't being restored, so I'll poke around for that as well.

Check out the "core concepts" page on the main site

[Rime]

I wasn't using command lines.  I was using pcmanfm to drag files and make symlinks.  I've tried making symlinks with the Program Files folder and also the Drive_c folder on other reboots.  This should be ok, right?

Before, what went wrong is it keeps telling me I have no free space on my HD.

Although I thought I had Diablo 2 installed (by ignoring the "out of space" error), it looks as if most of the time the game does not want to run at all (no error messages, either).  In the odd instance it does run (from subsequent reboots/copy/symlinking), it asks me to use insert the Play CD, which is in the CD-ROM and mounted.  I keep running winecfg, and detecting the drives, but it simply does not want to recognize the CD in the drive.

I've decided to try installing other games, but again, they won't let me ignore the "out of space" detection.

I'm going to try a brand new installation and reply back once I've tried reinstalling the particular games.  I may have corrupted something while trying to move/symlink a folder.

[daemonjax]

I've never used WINE, but dosbox does work well for old dos games.  Of course, anytime you use any emulation performance suffers by around one order of magitude.

[curaga]

I saw claims somewhere that Wine emulation overhead is only ~10% for 2d or OpenGL games, as there's very little to transform there. For DirectX games it is more of course.

Dosbox is pretty fast, I used to play Red Alert on a P3-1Ghz full speed. The latest 0.73 version claims to be even faster than previous versions.

[Rime]

Good news.  There's that rl thing, not to mention multiple reboots (or perhaps "reinventing the wheel" is more apt) can be quite tiring.  I was preparing to format the hard drive when I came up to the boot menu and those little words you mentioned about making a home directory on another drive marched across my mind.

The suggestion about booting tinycore home=<drive> was just what I needed.  No fuss, no muss.  No need to reinvent the wheel.  I may frag hda1 and do a fresh install, and I believe I've got some work to do with ALSA and Xorg, but I'm confident that WINE is running properly.  Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

[Sheleh]

The suggestion about booting tinycore home=<drive> was just what I needed.

I have same record in the file extlinux.conf, (home = sda1), but the directory 'sda1/home/tc' is empty and mydata.tgz file still created.