Wine on Ubuntu

I'm finding more reasons to like running Ubuntu on the desktop. Two of my favorite Windows applications are MWSnap (a simple screen capture tool) and Irfanview (a simple image viewer and editor). (Gimp fans, please spare me your comments. I can't stand that program. It's a bulldozer when all I need is a garden shovel.)

I poked around looking for native Linux programs that might suit my needs, but then I thought "What about using Wine to run the Windows binaries on Linux?" I'd never used Wine before, but it was only an 'apt-get install wine' away from appearing on my Ubuntu laptop.

I first tried Irfanview, but I ran into the same issues as described here. After creating /home/richard/wine and putting mfc42.dll there with installation binaries for Irfanview and MWSnap, I was able to run Wine in that directory and install both programs.

Wine ended up creating the following directory structure.

richard@neely:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files$ ls -al
total 5
drwxr-xr-x 5 richard richard 1024 2007-03-21 11:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 richard richard 1024 2007-03-21 11:42 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 richard richard 1024 2007-03-21 11:42 Common Files
drwxr-xr-x 5 richard richard 1024 2007-03-21 11:43 IrfanView
drwxr-xr-x 3 richard richard 1024 2007-03-21 11:46 MWSnap

Running each program requires something like this:

richard@neely:~$ wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/IrfanView/i_view32.exe 
richard@neely:~$ wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/MWSnap/MWSnap.exe 

Overall I am really pleased to see this working so well.