Hands on: How to get more from Linux

Some programs are listed under the ‘Platinum’ category, which means they run flawlessly under Wine on a standard plain installation. This quite impressive long list includes Photoshop CS2 and Guild Wars.

A separate ‘Gold’ list (applications that require some configuration) and ‘Bronze’ list (those that have minor flaws) also exist. In all, the site provides information about thousands of Windows programs.

Both Ubuntu and Fedora have versions of Wine in their repositories. These are unlikely to be the latest version. The Wine project provides an up-to-date repository itself for Ubuntu. The instructions provided are clear and very easy to follow, and essentially involve pasting a couple of commands into a shell.

The process will add a new security key (to verify the packages) and add the new repository so that Wine can be installed using apt-get (or the graphical Synaptic program). No packages are provided for Fedora, although this distribution tends to keep its own official packages of Wine fairly up to date. At the time of writing, the 1.0 release was in the Fedora testing repository.

Once installed, you’ll find the Wine configuration utility under the Applications menu. Any Windows applications you install will have their menus created under this new Wine sub-menu. The package will set up the desktop to launch Wine to run any Windows executable (.exe) files just by clicking on them.

Transmission
Both Ubuntu and Fedora have included the excellent Transmission Bittorrent program as standard. This client, which also exists for OSX, is designed to be lightweight, both in memory and CPU usage, and includes all the features typically needed.

Many CD and DVD images are distributed via Bittorrent, and Transmission is configured to handle the protocol without any fuss. The application is rapidly developed, however, and the version installed may be well behind the latest version.

The third-party package site for Ubuntu provides the latest version of Transmission, along with many applications and games that are not part of the Ubuntu repositories, or are not up to date.

Ubuntu is configured to handle ‘.deb’ files (software packages) by clicking on the icon. However, Transmission comes as two packages and the ‘transmission-common’ package must be installed before the ‘transmission-gtk’ package. It may be simpler to install both from the command line together to avoid any problems with dependencies or conflicts:
$ sudo dpkg -i transmission*

Replacing supported packages from Ubuntu with unsupported third-party ones can lead to problems and is generally not recommended. In this instance, no other packages are affected and there should not be any issues.