Installing Kindle on debian testing under wine

finally managed to get this working. I think things are complicated when target machine is 64 bit. I really was keen to get this running on my netbook, and Acer Aspire One.

The steps are a bit scrappy and gleaned from various blogs, but, basically what I did was:

Follow the steps in this blog to get wine installed on Debian Testing. i.e. (as root):

ARCH=`uname -m | sed -e s/x86_64/amd64/ -e s/i.86/i386/`
wget -r -A "*_$ARCH.deb" http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/
sudo dpkg -i dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/*.deb

then hop over to this blog, and follow most of the steps in that. Don’t need to install wine as we’ve already got that now, in theory, but cabextract definitely handy.

actually, thinking about it, the only steps I ended up using were these:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefonts

I was getting closer all the time but still it crashed. Until I found this tip on the wineHQ website:

To work around the msvcp90 bugs, delete or rename ­this file:

~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.vc90.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4148_none_deadbeef.manifest

Note that Wine will recreate that file every time you upgrade. To avoid this, make the directory read-only.

and now it works.

Gnome 3

Ok, so you’re typing, and want to use <tab> to help you on your journey. You want to do an ‘ls’ on certain files. You’re not sure what they are. You do ‘ls -l da’ then you hit TAB, because you want to see what’s there. It’s 2 TAB hits to get the autocomplete, but what’s this, on the FIRST tab hit, there’s a DING! Well thanks Gnome3. What the hell is that for. In what way, is you giving me an ALERT on hitting tab, in any way, useful to me?

Full Circle

It feels like I’ve gone full circle. I started, some time ago, with slackware, installed from a couple of floppies. Then Redhat, Suse, Mandrake and Ubuntu. I’m sure there were others. But in and out of the distros there was always debian. I like Ubuntu but then after one particular upgrade I discovered that, overnight, the desktop had morphed into something gruesome. I could’ve tinkered and regressed. Instead I moved to Linux Mint. Then to Linux Mint Debian. And the LMDE chair was very comfy.

But recently I wanted to install Linux on a couple of clapped out old headless servers. They don’t have USB ports, at least, not bootable ones. They have floppy drives, and space-age CDROM drives. But LMDE is only available on DVDs. I’m sure there are ways of getting LMDE on a CDROM and doing a network install but I really can’t be arsed finding out. Why bother when I can just install debian?

So I installed Debian, and saw that it was good. Really easy. Then I installed it on another Clapped out PC, and that was easy too. Then I installed it on a laptop, and that wasn’t quite so easy. But still easy enough to be worth the effort. It is suggesting I use some abomination that calls itself Gnome 3 but I found it just as happy to use Xfce4 instead. It’s now being installed on an Acer Aspire One 753, and that is not without its problems. But not big problems. And I’ll have debian. It’s like putting on a big comfy pair of slippers.