wine locked my X

[Siplus]

i was just testing around in the terminal to see if i could figure out how to use wine, but my first question: when i mount my windows drive, how would i access Program Files? b/c it has a space in it i guess. but when i found a game that i could find, (it just happened to be Redfaction...i know that wine probibly won't work w/ it, and winex currently doesn't support it), and typed wine rf.exe, X just froze... it gave an error like '"directX8 not found" click ok to close the program', but my mouse died and i could just hit enter, tab to it or anything, i was just stuck. i logged into root to see if i could figure out a way to kill wine or something, but i didn't see anything that would help me, and i dn't know many commands.

so, if this happens again, how can i stop wine or redfaction w/o logging out and back in when i'm in X?

[voidmain]

Similar to the way you would have done it in "DOS" if you used the full name and not the 8.3 translations. You use either wild cards or put the directory in quotes:

$ cd /c/Prog*Files/Mic*Office

or

$ cd "/c/Program Files/Microsoft Office"

or

$ wine "/c/Program Files/Starcraft/StarCraft.exe"

or

$ wine "C:/Program Files/Starcraft/StarCraft.exe"

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Siplus]

cool, thanks void main

when i did this though, i couldn't get back to my X desktop, i could do anyting i wanted w/ the keyboard (except hit enter for the error message), but i still had to restart X. i [ctrl]+[alt][F1], logged into root, and ran top (the only thing i could think of the show current processes) to see if i saw "wine" or "redfaction" or "really stupid error that makes X lock up" (not really), but i didn't see anything. i just started typing kill X, kill wine, kill me...but nothing worked...

[Calum]

re: wine, more recent versions of wine allow you to put the unix path to the windows executable instead if you prefer (which i would) eg:

wine /mnt/windows/Program\ Files/Windows/write.exe

ah yes, one more thing, notice i escaped the space with a \ which you can put before any 'special character' on a unix command line, including a space.

not sure about the X problem though, X is largely a mystical black box to me i am afraid!

[emh]

quote:Originally posted by Siplus:
cool, thanks void main

when i did this though, i couldn't get back to my X desktop, i could do anyting i wanted w/ the keyboard (except hit enter for the error message), but i still had to restart X. i [ctrl]+[alt][F1], logged into root, and ran top (the only thing i could think of the show current processes) to see if i saw "wine" or "redfaction" or "really stupid error that makes X lock up" (not really), but i didn't see anything. i just started typing kill X, kill wine, kill me...but nothing worked...

You might try "killall" for the command instead of "kill".

As far as Wine locking up your desktop, I think that happens sometimes when your Wine is set up to open Windows programs as managed.  To keep X from locking up, you might try setting your Wine settings to "unmanaged" to see if that helps.  Otherwise, you can also try running the program in its own desktop.  Let me know if you need any help with setting it like this.

[voidmain]

emh is right. If you want to kill a process by name you have to use "killall". The kill command requires the PID (process ID number) of the process. If you run a program in wine that isn't behaving properly (it *is* a Windows program you are running) what I usually do is something like this:

$ ps auxwww | grep wine

which might return something like this:

Code: [Select]

That last process is the grep command I just ran, ignore it. You can see that there are two wine processes running. Their PIDs are "27900" and "27902". You should first try and kill the processes with no special signals so as to try and let the process shut down normally with this command:

$ kill 27900 27902

Run the "ps" command again and see what wine processes are left. Try killing the other wine process. If nothing has changed when you run the kill and "ps" command add the "-9" signal to the kill command:

$ kill -9 27903

If this doesn't kill it then you might need to restart X but it should take care of the problem. You can restart X at the virtual console by:

# telinit 3
# telinit 5

[KernelPanic]

Ctrl + Alt + F1
 
then

killall -9 wine

Usually works for me. Is that a correct way to do it?

[voidmain]

Yeah, that's easier, I'm stuck in the old days.        Actually you would want to try it without the "-9" first. It will allow the program to try and shut down normally, flushing and closing open file handles etc. Failing that, a "-9" should take care of it. If you are not careful killall might kill more than you want though. kill gives you a little more granularity. You can give killall the "-i" parameter so it will ask you before killing each process. Much better way to do it:

$ killall -i progname

failing that

$ killall -i -9 progname

You might want to look at the man page (man killall) as there are other inetersting and useful options.

"pgrep" and "pkill" are new commands I just ran across that is part of the procps package, see "man pgrep". Actually it appears they've been around for a couple of years now. So behind... But  your mileage may vary when trying any of these commands on other *NIX systems. You can be sure "ps" and "kill" will be there.

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]