Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon : Wine freezes pc

After an upgrade from Linux Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, with some hardware configurations, any windows program (*.exe) run through the Wine or the Wine configuration itself (winecfg run from a terminal) will bring the mouse and the keyboard to freeze. Some would tell it brings the pc to crash, since a recovery seems not possible. The only way out is to reboot.

If you are using a graphic card with a via driver, the graphic card driver (also called display driver or video driver) with 3D enabled is somehow responsible.

While we are waiting for a correction that will allow 3D and Wine to tolerate each other, there are 2 possibilities to get rid of this blockage and to get the Wine to work again quickly:
1. Disabling 3D in the driver or
2. Choosing a simple vesa driver

Solution 1: Disabling 3D

In the file : /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Comment the and with a character and add and , like shown below. One only of both modifications (commenting and disabling) could perhaps be sufficient, but I did not test it.


To edit xorg.conf, you need root rights.

Solution 2: using vesa

In the file : /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Replace the line: with , in the section Device, like shown below.


To edit xorg.conf, you need root rights.

Editing as root

To edit xorg.conf with root rights, you need to run gedit or kate as sudo instead of the ordinary user,
type gksudo gedit in a terminal window (ubuntu)
type kdesu kate in a terminal window (kubuntu)

Additional comments

With the 1st solution above, the Wine did work quite fine and Windows software under the Wine too. But I soon observed that the pc was sluggish overall, especially when switching from one opened program to another one or when switching from one workspace to another one.

So I choosed to try the 2nd solution and there was no sluggish behaviour anymore. Such facts might be dependent on the hardware of course. Some users with another hardware may not observe that sluggish behaviour after opting for the 1st solution.