[Alexandria Radio Club Reflector] Winlink on Ubuntu

[Kenneth R. van Wyk]

(Posted this on our Discord server. Sorry for the duplicates.)

I have Winlink Express with VARA HF, VARA FM, ARDOP, and VarAC running reliably under WINE in Ubuntu. It can be done. I've expunged and reloaded my WINE sandbox a couple times now before I found the configuration that works well for me. Key points:

1 - Use THE LATEST WINE directly from WineHQ.org. Follow their instructions and put their repository into your apt.sources list.

2 - Install WINE and Winetricks (see 3 below) in a 32-bit prefix. If you install in the (default) 64-bit, you'll also learn how to expunge and reload your WINE sandbox, just as I did.

3 - ONLY install the Winetricks you NEED to run your apps. There are lists of them on VarAC and elsewhere. As I said above, the biggies for me were Visual Basic Runtime and the .NET framework. Install the most current of each. MORE IS NOT BETTER.

4 - Install corefonts and any other fonts you care to. I used the "Allfonts" recipe in Winetricks.

When I followed these guidelines, things worked well. Prior to that, some things looked like they ran, but there were strange goings on that annoyed me -- like not being able to change any font sizes in Winlink Express. I can do that now...

Linux, like UNIX, isn't prone to guard rails. It will gleefully let you drive your care straight off the cliff. If you do screw up something in WINE, you can use Winetricks to delete everything. Keep those installers for the apps you downloaded...

That said, I plan to be Microsoft free for this week's Winlink Wednesday. I'll have the windows system ready, just in case, but that's the plan.

Cheers,

Ken
K0RvW


P.S. If you’re not on Discord, you’re missing out on a really great environment for chatting and sharing information. Very easy to install and use, and the interface is rather intuitive.


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