Linux: Installing Fritz 9 on Ubuntu using Wine

One of the things that really annoys me is that the recent kernel with Ubuntu doesn't have the kernel headers in the package tree yet. What that means for me is that I have to reboot to an earlier version of the kernel in order to use VMWare. Since, at the current moment, the only thing I am doing with my Windows setup under VMWare is playing Fritz 9 and analyzing games, I wanted a better way to do it than having to boot into VMWare each time. Fortunatly, Wine has made tremendous strides since the last time I had worked with it. I used this article as a baseline for my installation instructions, and it is where I borrowed the run script from.

First thing I did was start up Synaptic and installed the following two packages:

Wine

LibWine

Once installed, I opened up a terminal window and typed in “wine” at the command prompt. Of course, the first time I run this, I need to wait while the configuration is created. I also decide I want to reconfigure some default options, just in case some libraries need to be included, so after Wine completed, I type in “winecfg” at the command prompt to bring up the Wine Configuration Utility.

I set the following options for Fritz:

Windows Version: Windows 98

I go to Drivers, and hit AutoDetect for devices

That is it for my configuration. Now, I mount my CD-Rom and run the setup program with Wine.

mount /media/cdrom

cd /media/cdrom

wine Setup.exe

From here, the Setup Wizard starts successfully. I go through the standard Fritz 9 Installation using the following options:

Directory: C:\Fritz9\

Documents and databases: C:\Fritz9\Documents

(Note: In both cases, I had to manually navigate to My Computer\C: in order to set these folders.)

I took out the Midi Files, Speech Files, 3D, Spoken Notation, and Speech Engine.

After the installation hung, I followed the instructions on the above linked article and copied the STDOLE* files from my existing Windows 98 installation over to my fake Windows System folder. In addition to the STDOLE files, I also put any other libraries that were listed as “exported” under the WineDBG output when the installation crashed, so the following libraries were copied from my Windows\System folder to the System folder under my Fake Windows:

STDOLE*

RPC*

OLE*

KERNEL32*

I re-ran the installation program for Wine, and put in the following library overrides:

ole32 (native, builtin)

oleaut32 (native, builtin)

oledlg (native, builtin)

rpcrt4 (native, builtin)

With these updates, I went back to the /media/cdrom/Setup folder and re-ran the setup program:

wine setup.exe

That appeared to solve all of my installation woes. The Direct X setup didn't quite go as well as I was expecting, but that is OK. I just ignored the failed installation.

So I do my first run like so:

cd /home/digiassn/.wine/drive_c/Fritz9

wine ChessProgram9.exe

The problem that I run into is that the fonts are screwed up... so I try to getting rid of my library overrides to see if that fixes the problem. That did not fix my problem, so the next thing I tried was to remove the \fonts files, which fixed my problems. When I actually got Fritz to run, it couldn't find my CDROM drive. I noticed when i was doing the registering that the first drive I was prompted for when looking for the CDROM was not the correct drive assigned from the auto-assignment. So I restarted the configuration tool, and removed all drives except the CDROM and the C: drive, and set the CDROM drive type to CDROM. I reran the ChessProgram9 executable. I got as far as getting Fritz started, however the program hung when I went to any menus. So I got back to the drawing board and re-override all my libraries as illustrated above since I removed the overrides trying to correct the font issue. That also did not fix my issue. I could play chess just fine, but each time I tried to open a menu, it caused the program to lock. I looked at the diagnostic messages in the terminal when running, and noticed that there were a lot of errors “toolbar” and “dbghelp”, so I looked to see if there was a way to override these libraries as well.

I didn't quite get this up and running 100 percent, but I did manage to get it somewhat usable. With keyboard shortcuts and all the menu icons enabled, I was able to enter my games and do what I needed to do. This isn't ideal, but it will do for now. I have found some issues where a patch and recompile will fix the problem, but at this point in time, I will live with the issue until I have more time.

Update: I installed the Wine packages for Ubuntu from the Wine HQ site, which work much better than the default Ubuntu Wine packages. I still had the issue with the toolbar, however rather than hanging now, the program just crashes immediatly. So I tried installing Fritz 8 using the above instructions, and sure enough, Fritz 8 works without any problems. I will have to live with the features that Fritz 8 offers, but since I just catalog and analyze my games, I don't believe I will miss much.