[RESOLVED] Does anyone know what borked WINE this week?

Somehow in the past week I went from having apps I could use with no trouble to not being able to see squat in WINE windows. I made a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue yesterday but haven’t gotten a request so I’m throwing the query out here as well as you can see in the screenshots I included with the post.

This is what I get when I try to run winecfg. As you can see there’s no text, not even the text on the tabs themselves, so it’s impossible for me to set anything. I can’t even set the version of Windows used because I can’t see which version is which.

I tried blowing away both WINE and CrossOver Pro to try to undo any changes I had made, and I’ve tried several different themes, all to no avail. When I try a program called Gentibus CD (formerly known as VistaCD), which worked fine in CrossOver a few days ago, it’s now so borked I can’t even load my old cd database so I can try to import it into a Linux-native app.

I’m at my wits end. I don’t even know at what point things screwed the pooch although I’ve tried enough things that I should have rolled them back by now if it were something I had done. Does anyone have any ideas what I’m missing?

Updated 3 November 3:30 pm EST: It looks like an Nvidia regression is causing the issue. In fact now that I think about it the issues started after installing the beta drivers. Now that I have it narrowed down I guess I can reboot and use the onboard Intel graphic subsystem to get the apps installed and set up in Crossover Pro. Then I can switch back to my normal Nvidia setup to get most of my tasks done. Although hopefully now that we know it’s aregression we can get the bug squashed before too much longer. I’ll keep posting updates as I get them.

RESOLVED 6 November 7:30 am: Thanks to comment #144, from Peter Remmers, on Launchpad bug #251107 I was able to get this issue resolved. It turns out there is an entry on the WINE FAQ that I completely missed on several passes through the page.

6.18. Using wine over remote X11 sessions and No text or damaged text displayed

Please make sure not have added any fonts to wine. Font conflicts can sometimes cause a similar issue. If a fresh wine prefix.(A copy of wine that nothing has been done to yet) Is having this problem. Try setting following in registry

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver]
"ClientSideWithRender"="N"

Place above in text file and it can be inserted into registry by “regedit settings.txt”.

This was report as been required of OS X on the 1 Dec 2007. This may change. Please apply only as required.

What I did was simply place the text file, which I called settings.txt, into ~/.wine/drive_c and in Terminal run

env WINEPREFIX="/home/[YourUsername]/.wine" regedit settings.txt

Updated 9 Dec: You should use your username to identify the location of your home folder. I don’t think your system would have a clue as to the location of my /home directory, unless you also have a user named Peng. My bad.

I’m not sure if I needed to run the env WINEPREFIX="/home/peng/.wine" but I did just to make sure it would run. The response I got was simply

:~$

which means it ran the command with no problems. Since I have CrossOver Linux Pro installed on this box I used Applications > CrossOver > Run a Windows Command. Then I clicked the Browse button, set the filetype to All files (*), located the file (which I had copied into ~/.cxoffice/win98/drive_c just to make it easier for me), selected settings.txt and clicked Open. I edited the command to put regedit in the front and clicked Run. (The dialog box was widened to show you the entire command I ran.)

Now I have full use of both the WINE configuration window and my Windows apps under CrossOver Linux Pro.

Thanks to everyone who helped diagnose and resolve my issue. And Peter? I owe you a brew.