Wine notes

Russell Bateman
March 2021
last update:



Version: Wine 5.0 on Linux Mint 20.1

Wine is a recursive backronym for Wine is not an emulator.

Installation

I didn't keep notes, however, there are plenty of wine tutorials around. I googled "linux mint wine tutorials."

Note that I did (successfully) move the stuff under ~/.wine to /home2/wine and create symbolic links to it under ~/.wine. The Windows C:\ drive is one of those things under ~/.wine.

My main purpose is to be able to use TurboTax. This cannot be done as...

  1. TurboTax 2020 requires Windows 10.
  2. TurboTax 2020 requires .NET 4.5.

The first problem can be solved. The second cannot at least with Wine 5.0. Wine 6.x is out and I will try that eventually, but I find no dicussion of TurboTax on Wine that makes the claim this software has ever worked. Most of the Wine users appear to be gamers and are interested in nothing else.

Installing TurboTax?

You must change Wine from Windows 7 (default) to Windows 10 because TurboTax 2020 will not run on Windows 7.

To do this, run... 

$ winecfg

...and change the version of Windows in the drop-down near the bottom of the configuration dialog (Applications tab).

However, TurboTax will eventually fail with: 

004c:err:winediag:SECUR32_initNTLMSP ntlm_auth was not found or is outdated.
Make sure that ntlm_auth >= 3.0.25 is in your path. Usually, you can find it in the winbind package of your distribution.
0060:err:mscoree:CLRRuntimeInfo_GetRuntimeHost Wine Mono is not installed

I found Wine missing ntlm_auth 3.0.25 

# apt-get install --reinstall winbind
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  ffmpeg libavresample4 mpv python3-pyxattr rtmpdump
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
Suggested packages:
  libnss-winbind libpam-winbind
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  winbind
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 466 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2,109 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 winbind amd64 2:4.11.6+dfsg-0ubuntu1.6 [466 kB]
Fetched 466 kB in 1s (465 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package winbind.
(Reading database ... 389512 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../winbind_2%3a4.11.6+dfsg-0ubuntu1.6_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking winbind (2:4.11.6+dfsg-0ubuntu1.6) ...
Setting up winbind (2:4.11.6+dfsg-0ubuntu1.6) ...
mkdir: created directory '/var/lib/samba/winbindd_privileged'
changed group of '/var/lib/samba/winbindd_privileged' from root to winbindd_priv
mode of '/var/lib/samba/winbindd_privileged' changed from 0755 (rwxr-xr-x) to 0750 (rwxr-x---)
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/winbind.service → /lib/systemd/system/winbind.service.
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.31-0ubuntu9.2) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (245.4-4ubuntu3.4) ...

Then, I relaunched wine and got this next error: 

0060:err:mscoree:CLRRuntimeInfo_GetRuntimeHost Wine Mono is not installed

I found Mono package for wine is not installed. I followed these instructions:

$ wine64 uninstaller

  1. Click Install button.
  2. Navigate to wine-mono-5.0.0-x86.msi and click Open.
  3. It won't show up until you click OK to dismiss wine64 Add/Remove Programs.
  4. Relaunch $ wine64 uninstall to see what got installed:
  5. Relaunch the TurboTax 2020 installation. 
$ wine /home2/TurboTax2020/setup.exe

I got: 

We can't install TurboTax on your computer just yet...
There seems to be a problem with some system files on your computer, but don't
worry. We'll help you get it fixed up so we can get working on your biggest
refund possible.

Click OK. I relaunched and got this next error: 

00a4:err:msi:ITERATE_Actions Execution halted, action L"LaunchConditions" returned 1603

Then, I found: Install MSI with wine and studied it.

I went to https://appdb.winehq.org/ and created a log-in to see if TurboTax was listed as a Wine-supported application. It's not.

The problem is that Wine doesn't support .NET 4.5 (or, does it?). Wine must use Mono and Mono lags behind in support for .NET. The TurboTax error page says it all:

Troubleshooting problems with Windows Installer and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Likelihood of joy?

I checked out this page Wine Mono in hopes of reaching an understanding, but the version-number soup is indecypherable between this page and the .NET AppDB page.