Although I work almost 100% with Linux these days, I have a few Windows applications I find useful (including IrfanView for quick image edits and OCR -- much simpler, albeit less powerful, than GIMP) and PathSync for synchronizing local directories with my thumb drives. I also find PDF-XChange Viewer handy for adding annotations to PDF files. All these programs run fine under Wine, with one small "gotcha". When I install them (by downloading the Windows installer and then running "wine name-of-installer.exe"
in a terminal), shortcuts to them are added to the Wine submenu of the
GNOME menu ... but the shortcuts are often dysfunctional. They attempt
to launch the Windows .lnk
file added to the (virtual) Windows start menu, and typically I either
get a "file not found" pop-up or the launch simply fails silently.
The
solution I have found is to manually edit the shortcuts. Suppose that I
am logged in as user "paul" and I've just installed IrfanView. My
first step is to track down the Windows path to the executable.
Assuming defaults were used (generally a good thing when installing
software under Wine), I open a terminal and drill down to /home/paul/.wine/drive-c/Program\ Files, where I find the IrfanView directory and, in that, the i_view32.exe executable.
The next step is to run
env WINEPREFIX="/home/paul/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe"
in
a terminal and make sure that it launches correctly. Note that the
path to the executable is written Windows-style (backslashes, no
escaping things) in quotation marks. If the program launches properly, I
close it, copy the entire line to the clipboard, find the launcher in
the GNOME menu, right-click and choose "Edit properties", and replace the contents of the "Command:" field with the contents of the clipboard. I also confirm that launcher type is "Application" and not "Application in Terminal". With that done, I close the
launcher edit panel and test it. Sometimes it seems to take a while
before the menu detects and adopts the change I just made. I'm not
sure, shy of logging out (overkill?), what the best way to impose the
change immediately is. I've tried "killall gnome-panel" (possibly also overkill) with mixed success.
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