A possible exe solution fails...

[GreyGeek]

This thread's last post is one month old. I've played a LOT with wine over the last month. Yesterday and today I began a marathon struggle to install my ECG application.
Each attempt began with a purge of wine and then installing it (version 5.0) and using "sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386" followed by installing i386 versions of various libraries.
I used something like "sudo apt-get install libatk-adaptor:i386". If the library didn't have an i386 version the install request would fail without harm.
Then I created a 32bit wine bottle:
"WINARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/jerry/.wine32 winecfg"
followed by
"WINARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/jerry/.wine32 wine Setup.exe"

One time, just one time, it appeared to install. I ran it and was presented with monstrosity of GUI. I could have lived with it except that none of the data entry buttons would work!

After that the Setup.exe program always failed with a variety of failure msgs. I followed the leads in each message. One web site suggested it was due to bad Nivida i386 componanets. I switched to Intel and rebooted. Same problem. Switched back to Nvidia.
Kubun
SpaceEngine098.exe had installed easily by just clicking on the exe. It still runs nicely.

ECG Viewer installed on Kubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, and it ran till I replaced 18.04 with 20.04. Failing to install it on 20.04 I just read the ECG from the monitor on the device and explained the results to my wife. I still have a backlog of ECG datafiles that I've kept and need to print out.

Anywhoo, on a lark I pulled out one of my older hdcaddy's from 2017 (running on 16.04) and copies the installed program to my wine32 bottle:

$ vdir .wine32/drive_c/
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 228 Nov 1 14:56 ECG\ Data\ Manager
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 18 Nov 1 12:53 ProgramData
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 118 Nov 1 12:53 Program\ Files
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 118 Nov 1 12:53 Program\ Files\ (x86)
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 22 Nov 1 12:53 users
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 374 Nov 1 12:53 windows

and

$ vdir .wine32/drive_c/ECG\ Data\ Manager/
total 6360
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1024000 Jul 4 2008 cl32.dll
...
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 4238848 Apr 20 2017 ECGDM.exe
...
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 616448 Apr 12 2017 TestECGVM_B.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 616448 Apr 12 2017 TestECGVM_B_t.exe
drwxrwxr-x 1 jerry jerry 0 Nov 1 14:56 Tmpda

I double clicked on ECDM.exe and IT RAN! 😮

I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

While searching around for possible problems I noticed that while
/~lib64's directory had an link that pointed to /lib64/@ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, another link which pointed to /x86_64-linux-gnu, a directory which contains all the wine64 apps and tools.
On the other hand the
/~lib32 directory is empty.
In the /lib directory is a link, @ld-linux.so.2, which points to /lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.31.so. The /libi386-linux-gnu directory contains all the win32 apps and tools.
I thought about adding a link in /~lib32 to point to @ld-linux.so.2 but I don't understand how wine32 is supposed to work and I didn't want to bork my system so I left well enough alone.

So, all my problems have beenr resolved, my two most important WinX programs are running, and LibreWolf is working great as a FF replacement.

EDIT:
LibreWolf would not connect to my smtp outbound server so that addon would not work. In another thread I described how I got FF93 to play YT vidieo's audio streams. So, I switched back to FF93.