An excerpt from my diary, from the 24th of February, 2024.
Far before I ever got into all of this, I had heard of WINE and its capacity to allow for Windows programs to run within the GNU/Linux workspace. “It’s not an emulator, it’s a compatibility layer” is a quote that always stuck in my head for whatever reason. Anyway, I figured it’d be a good idea to try and get something set up; not necessarily to fill my computer with non-free software, but just in case of complications or limitations for my migration. This comes in handy sooner than I’d expect later on, funnily enough. From what I was reading, I expected WINE to be a bit of a tedious process, so when I saw applications like WINE Tricks and WINE Z GUI, I jumped on the opportunity to get started. As it turns out, this was a bad idea, which ended me on a wild goose chase for hours trying to figure out why applications were being copied over, and trying to form their own containers. Obviously this was going to fail, all of these applications have dependencies within their folders for configuration files, and packaged .dlls. As it turns out, the solution is to simply uninstall everything, and follow the WINE install process through their actual website. This also helps me figure out the Ubuntu version I’m based on, because apparently there are several, and I have been confused about this in other free software releases before. Throw in a cat /etc/os-release and suddenly things make sense. So for the future, I’ve got Jammy Jellyfish, Ubuntu 22.04—good to know! I follow the rest of the steps on the installation page, and all is well! Now all I do is just open with WINE from the context menu, and it (sometimes) just works! The most impressive thing I’ve tried so far was Super Lesbian Animal RPG, which just worked right away, no questions asked. Incredible stuff.
Now here comes my main reason for doing this: checking to see if some simple tools I had for Windows actually will work on GNU/Linux, ones which I used extremely often and are free software from GitHub. The first is a music spectral analysis program called Spek, a very simple drag and drop application, which can quickly show me any sheer lines and ensure my high res audio is legitimate. I use this software constantly for new downloads and purchases. On first impression it works flawlessly! I do think to myself if there is a similar lightweight alternative—I don’t want to open something like Tenacity and import stuff every time—but Spek really seems to be the best option. In fact, there does even seem to be a pre-release for Debian systems (and I can install .deb files). I end up going on a wild ride for hours trying to compile this stuff after downloading relevant dependencies, editing the code’s minimum version requirements, and downloading an earlier version to hopefully compile that instead, but everything failed. I’ve yet to successfully compile anything thus far, I’m starting to acquire learned helplessness about it. Anyway, it seems like the best way to run this free software for the moment is somehow through WINE, honestly quite incredible.
The second program is a DRM circumvention tool which ran through Windows command prompt, which I also used very extensively because I do not trust streaming services to actually keep their media. I stay subscribed at the highest tier, and they give me high quality stuff I can keep locally and decrypt. A win-win as long as they keep it that way. I try to run it, it fails, I forgot to change my auth key, so I do that. Run it again, it fails the same way. Damn, head over to GitHub and realize this entire time there is a proper built GNU/Linux build which can be run straight through the terminal. Load it up, works exactly as expected, and I’m thrilled! That means one fewer thing I have to concern myself about with this migration, we are all set on this front!
Feeling good about making all this progress, I figure perhaps it’s time to take another stab at DaVinci Resolve. I run the file, note the missing dependencies, realize that isn’t quite good enough, and search online for install troubleshooting. Find a thread with listed terminal outputs for what needs to be installed so I can name and retrieve them properly. Do so, run it again, and it actually opens! Big progress! I go through the motions, finish installation, run it from the super window...and the computer hangs. Lovely, maybe it doesn’t quite like the tiled windows? I know the application has a launcher window, and that might not play nice to resizing. Whatever, I reboot the computer, get ready to run again, realize my drives can’t mount. I about shit my pants, but open GParted and see things still appear as expected. Mounting continues to fail however, so I do a quick boot into Windows to make sure something crazy didn’t happen. Thankfully not, so I restart again, then realize at that moment—in my haste to reboot—I must’ve ran the legacy boot for Pop instead of UEFI (both are able to be selected). Thank God, that was the issue; we’re fine. Load up DaVinci, and it works as expected...or so I thought. I figured maybe something might be broken in the pipeline, so I make a new project and do some basic things, with the plan to see if the process works in full. I don’t get very far though, as videos fail to work correctly. Images and audio work just fine, but videos of any format just give an empty audio track and nothing else. Well shit, this is nearly unusable then, and maybe there is something to be done here...but I am exhausted. This is what I get for installing non-free software I guess, I kinda deserved this. I’ll look into it another time, but at least I figured out some things along the way, and made some progress.
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