Wine, red for now.

For the past few days, I've been trying to run Windows applications on Wine. Failure rate has been high, but considering the type of applications that I tried, I'm not worrying much.

This craze started with my craving for Chrome and it's non-availability on Linux.

1) Google Chrome

This was the most unsuccessful of them all. The installation didn't even start.
I followed the procedure given here

And it died with the following error :(

npower@The-Matrix:~$ wine chrome_installer.exe
err:setupapi:detect_compression_type cannot open file L"H:\\-r"
err:setupapi:get_file_size cannot open file L"H:\\-r"
expand.exe: can't open input file H:\-r


2) Safari

Yup, one browser after another. Fail, again. Safari was up and running but I simply couldn't set the proxies. Browsing local sites was possible.



3) Multiproxy

Ah, the most useful of 'em all. Every time I boot, this is fired up, and keeps my browsing smooth.



4) Foobar2000

Yeay to me for trying this out in the first place. I love Amarok, yes, but memory. It uses up quite some memory. And systems like mine better do with something leaner. So, here comes in foobar2000. LastFM scrobbling also works. Rock on!



5) Google Talk

For some reason, this just doesn't work. :|

It gives this error first.


Just press Install, nothing happens, Google Talk starts up. Like this ,with a scrolling screen of warnings on the terminal, and, no text on Google Talk other than the text area. Hell with that, you just can't connect. It's the proxy problem I guess (since I use a university network), but you can't set that 'coz you can't see the "Settings" thingy, nor does blind guess-clicking work.



6) Paint

This is a small program and we always expected it to work. It does, but has its share of problems too. No support for any other file format other than Bitmaps. We can solve this I guess.

Anyway, it's good be back blogging. My exams are just done ;)

Briefly on Windows, and a lil' about Amarok.

Yeah, I needed Adobe Acrobat Professional. So I just rebooted into Windows. I've neglected Windows for too long, and it is all dysfunctional (uh?) now. Need to remove many applications or re-install them, my MS PowerPoint refuses to save any presentations, and neither is Daemon Tools working properly.

Anyway, I took this opportunity to install Chrome and checkout what the buzz is all about. Well, I like it. It is sleek and very very responsive. Something I _demand_ in applications (and people).

I was checking out all the web apps on Chrome, and while on Google Reader, found a post that talks about music players on Linux. I love Amarok, somehow the other players never scanned whole of my collection. However, few of the users complain that Amarok is slow. Well, yes, if you leave the collection to be maintained on a SQLite database. So, simply put, the suggestion is to use MySQL. How? Hers is the link, very simply explained. How to: set up MySQL Database in Amarok

If you are using Fedora or a Redhat based distribution, replace sudo apt-get install by sudo yum install

Incase you are a PostgreSQL fanboy, or a MySQL hater (frankly, I never used PostgreSQL, or have problems with MySQL, but statements like "mysql sucks, postgresql rules :)" with smileys make me consider PostgreSQL ;)), then check this out http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_HowTo

Note: PostgreSQL will be deprecated in Amarok 2.