Okay, here's what I've done. Hope my memory works because I'm at work on a Windows computer right now. I installed Wine in Ubuntu 15.04 and found it was v2.6(?). Also found there were later versions not in the Canonical repositories.
So I downloaded Play on Linux, which opened up the newer versions. I downloaded the latest version of Wine.
So let me install Silent Hunter 4 tonight and see what kind of errors I encounter and we'll go from there.
For the benefit of those not familiar with what we're doing here, Ubuntu Linux is very different from Windows. Even the disk format is different and all data is encoded to the disk entirely differently than Windows. Windows formatting systems are FAT, FAT32, there's another new FAT for large flash drives, and NTFS, the most common format for hard drives. Apple has their own separate formatting for hard drives. And Linux uses mostly ext1, ext2, ext3 and ext4.
These disk systems are not campatible. However Linux has FAT, FAT32 and NTSC routines built into the operating sytem so it reads and writes to Windows partitions like a native. Windows, typically for Microsoft, pretends Linux partitions don't exist and even refuses to give the disk drives a drive letter. Thank you Mocrosloth--fine citizen of the world.
WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is a similar system to Linux' ability to read Microsoft disks, that allows the Linux operating system to use compatible .dll files to execute Windows programs without using an emulator or virtual disk. Direct use of compatible .dll files gives WINE much better speed than a virtual disk.
One thing that is very useful is that the WINE developers realized that "compatible dlls" aren't perfectly compatible. But if you own a copy of Windows you can tell WINE to substitute the real article dll for their "compatible" one to get greater compatibility. I think (guess really) that we'll be doing some of that here.
When we're done we will have Silent Hunter running in a foreign, totally free, totally open, non-commercial software whose mission statement includes the fact that your computer belongs to you and that you have unrestricted right to manage it as you see fit.
This is worth some trouble to create and we'll end up with cookie cutter instructions so you can do the same thing. Pardon all the technical language we'll be spewing. When we're done you can do this and tell Microsoft to go away and come back when they've learned some respect.
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