PlayOnLinux
PlayOnLinux is a frontend to manage your “wine bottles”, which are separate instances of Wine environments which you can configure individually and even run on different Wine versions. PlayOnLinux helps you with installing the software and drivers needed to run them, as well as configure this installation individually, such as screen resolutions, wine version, and the Windows API version.
From here, you can install applications easily either by using pre-built scripts or by clicking through some simple menus. I can only suggest using PlayOnLinux rather than directly using Wine. You still have the option to directly using Wine as is anyway, but PlayOnLinux offers additional options for you.
There is some basic stuff that you should know about PlayOnLinux and how to manage your virtual drives.
PlayOnLinux installations
To install a new game or program, you just press the big install button at the top of the menu. A new window will open, and you can select what you want to install. You can install some programs or games from pre-written scripts that guide you through the entire install process very easily, or you can choose to install a non-listed program and select the options manually depending on your needs.
If you install the game from a premade script, you often only need to adjust minor things like the Wine version you want to run this on, because these scripts were made with a particular version of Wine which might be very outdated by now. Therefore, you only have to select a different version of Wine and be done after that (see configuration later). If you install a non-listed program, you have to make a couple of choices about how and what you want to install.
The first question is whether you want to install a program in a new virtual drive (wine bottle) or in a preexisting one. I prefer having individual drives for each game, unless they are tiny games like Bejeweled or something similar, which I normally put in the same virtual drive, at least on my laptop. This makes things easier if you have to configure them differently, and doesn’t mess up other already-working games because you are trying to fix a non-working game.
After you create a new drive or selected an existing one, you are asked if you want to change some options before you start installing your application. With the “Use another version of Wine” option, you can select a different version of Wine that you want to use to run your application. By default, this is always the System version that comes with your OS.
On ExaGear, this is version 2.0 with the ARM optimizations, which should be a very good default. On my laptop, I often change this, since even on Ubuntu 16.04, the default is still version 1.6 of Wine, while currently version 2.7 is already available in PlayOnLinux at the time of this article.
The “Configure Wine” option allows you to set up options for Wine, like the API version such as Windows 95 or Windows XP, or if you want to use a virtual desktop instead of running it directly on the Linux desktop. This is probably a very good thing to do, since many games run at a low resolution, and switching resolution on the fly does not work properly in all cases. To select this option, switch to the Graphics tab and enable the “Emulate a virtual desktop” checkbox. Good options to start with are 800×600 or 1024×768, since these are very common resolutions for older games. 1024×768 is actually nice if you run a 1080p resolution, while 800×600 looks really good in 720p.
Through the “Install some libraries” option, you pre-install libraries that you know are required to run your games properly, like “.Net framework”, “DirectX”, or just “dsound”, which are very commonly needed. To start, I suggest just setting up the virtual desktop and being done with it, since everything else can be done later if necessary.
After you’re done setting up your environment, the system will ask where it should install from. By default, it will scan for a CD that has an AutoStart on it and ask if it should start this. If it can’t find a similar file, it will ask you to select a setup/install file manually. This is where cdemu comes in handy, since it allows you to mount your images from CDs and DVDs from which you can install your games, but also installing GoG setup files should work fine.
The installation of software is straightforward, same as it would be on a Windows machine. After the installation, PlayOnLinux will automatically scan the new virtual drive for all .exe files that it may use to create a shortcut for you on the desktop. You select the start program of the game and give it a name. PlayOnLinux will repeat the process of you selecting additional .exe files for shortcuts until you say you have enough.
After that, you have a shortcut for your games and programs directly on the desktop as well as in PlayOnLinux itself. Since PlayOnLinux is a Python-based frontend, ExaGear does not recognize that it needs to start the links in an x86 environment if you double-click the icons on the desktop. This can easily be fixed by adding “exagear — ” at the beginning of the command line of the icon on your desktop. Just right click it, select properties and type “exagear — “ (without quotes) in front of the Command: line of the desktop shortcut. That’s all that needs to be done to start the games directly from the desktop.
