Ok I started using Puppy Linux because it is fast and works really well on this buggy VIA EPIA. Now the only problem I have installing anything that isn't in the Puppy Package Manager. I was able to get wine from the puppy website. I unzipped and installed it but it doesn't want to work like it did in Debian.
Nothing I ever try to use wine for ever works so I gave up with doze built applications some 4 years ago. have you tried starting it from a terminal with strace?
After searching til my head was about to explode I finally ran across a wine .pet file which installed and now wine is working but just for the heck of it, what is strace?
It's a command which lists every machine instruction involved with launching the application and dumping them either to a file or direct to the screen.. usually if something doesn't launch you will find right down at the end somethiong like "application exited on error.. segmentation fault" or something like it... tracing back can sometimes show which was the last instruction and is a good clue to what is going on..... some you can fix, others not. With the smaller distros it can be a powerful debugging tool http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/05/strace-very-powerful-troubleshooting.html welcome to the higher functions that are available to a linux user on demand
Wine normally prints out a bunch of debug info if you run it from a console anyway. I've had a bit of luck lately with it running GTA:SA and GTA:VC, so it is getting there. Just be careful with running .exe files from the net still - you can run Windows viruses just as easily as normal apps.
