Taming Troublesome Titles

This section in Adding New Verbs describes the basics of adding known workarounds to Winetricks verbs, but doesn't tell you how to find new ones.

Finding workarounds for new Wine problems is an art, not a science. Here are a few basic tips, plus examples of how it was done for a few existing Winetricks verbs.

Basic Tips

If you haven't read the FAQ yet, please do; see http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ

If sound is broken, sometimes winetricks dsoundhw=Emulated (aka using winecfg to set "DirectSound Hardware Acceleration" to "Emulation") helps.

If you don't know why an app won't start, the log might help; see How Can I Get a Debug Log?

You may need to turn on particular debugging channels to get enough info; see How Can I Get a Debug Trace?

Examples

Digitanks

This game crashed immediately on startup, showing just fixme:dbghelp:elf_search_auxv can't find symbol in module fixme:dbghelp:MiniDumpWriteDump NIY MiniDumpScanMemory over and over again in the log. Evidently it was crashing and writing out minidump files over and over again.

I checked http://bugs.winehq.org/ and http://appdb.winehq.org/, but there was no mention of this game yet.

I trolled for clues by turning on the +file debug channel, e.g. WINEDEBUG=+file wine digitanks.exe > log.txt 2>&1 and then loading log.txt in my favorite text editor.

Not too many lines before the minidump line, I saw the line trace:file:CreateFileW L"C:\\windows\\Fonts\\Arial.ttf" GENERIC_READ FILE_SHARE_READ FILE_SHARE_WRITE creation 3 attributes 0x80

Wine doesn't come with that file; you have to install it with winetricks corefonts. And sure enough, that command got the game to run.

Now that I knew the approximate cause of the crash, and had a workaround, I filed a bug report for it ( http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26915) and added these lines to the verb:

if w_workaround_wine_bug 26915 "installing corefonts" 
    then w_call corefonts 
fi

Case closed!