As regular readers of this forum are aware, I run Linux as the primary operating system on my computers. I can do just about everything I need to do on a computer with Linux, and I don't worry about viruses, spyware, trojans, worms, etc. About the only thing I cannot do is run a few specialized programs for which there is no Linux equivalent - things like Casino Verite, CVCX and all those other way cool programs from Norm/Qfit. Fortunately, I now have options.

It had been several years since I last looked at Wine, a Linux program that runs Windows applications, so this seemed like a good place to start.

I'm running Debian Lenny these days, and getting Wine was as easy as "apt-get install wine." It is now in most of the major distros' repositories. Ubuntu users can simply "sudo apt-get install wine" or use Synaptic Package Manager.

Wine has come a long way - the days of manually editing configuration files are long gone. A "Wine Configuration" icon will show up in your menu which will open an easy-to-follow configuration utility. You can pretty much just accept the defaults.

Even better, when you right-click on a Windows executable file, you will find you now have an "Open with Wine" option. Cool.

To test it, I popped a copy of Office 2003 in the optical drive, and ran the installation. The screen flickered a couple of times, which was rather disconcerting, then it installed without a hitch. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc., all work perfectly. Even better, I now have a "Wine" submenu in my menu, and running Word, etc., isn't really much different from running a native Linux app.

I find OpenOffice.org to be perfectly adequate for my Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation needs, but it will be nice to have Word for that occasional .doc file that doesn't format just right in OpenOffice.

Next, I installed Frugal Video Poker. It also installed without a hitch, even putting a shortcut on my desktop. It works perfectly - even the sound works!

Okay, this is getting interesting. I popped my Casino Verite version 3.0 CD in the drive . . . and discovered that my CD is corrupted. Oh well, time to update anyway. For now, I downloaded the latest demo versions from Qfit and continued.

The install ran without a hitch, and I was really getting excited, since I had never gotten this far with earlier versions of Wine. As with Frugal VP, it even put an icon on my desktop.

I clicked the icon. The screen flickered (which I had come to expect) . . . and I got the error message: "Component "AgentCtl.dll" or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

Undaunted, I booted up a Windows box with CV installed, located the elusive "AgentCtl.dll" and copied it into the Windows\msagent directory on Wine's virtual drive_c.

Unfortunately, this had no effect on the error message. Oh, well.

I believe that it is possible to get Casino Verite to work under Wine, but I don't have the Windows expertise to do it. Besides, I have discovered another alternative, which I will discuss in a future post - and it works just great!