I know it's pretty hopeless, but I figured what the hey, I'll try to install both the win version of firefox and silverlight to try to get Netflix instant play working and just see what happens. Well, the version installed was 1.0... something, and I tried that but was getting an error about not finding a volume to extract or something and read somewhere in internet land that this was fixed in a later version of wine. So I went abou trying to figure out how to install the latest stable version, but none of the repositories I tried seemed to work, so I ended up using a deb package for 1.1.42 instead (the one for Lenny - is that right?). Anyway, wine seems to be working. but it spit out a message about Gecko. I let it install Gecko (whatever that is) for me, but the next time I ran firefox, it said it again, so I guess it didn't take. Then I ran the Silverlight installer, and it hung. I couldn't close the firefox downloads window, the main firefox window, or the terminal window from which I launched it and had to reboot.

By the way, when I was poking around trying to figure this out, on a whim, I tried"apt-get upgrade wine" ('cause I don't have a clue what I'm doing), and I think I upgraded pretty much everything instead of just wine.

At this point, I think I'd like to try trudging on and see how close I can get to making Netflix instant play work, but if/when that fails, I'd just like a nice solid stable install of wine.

Where do I go from here?

I have had a similar problem when trying to install some of the windows games we have, the gecko installer did the same with one game but not the other, and the third I tried just hung like your silverlight installer. I found that for a lot of things it will help if you install playonlinux.

To install go to th control center, under the system tab, and press manage packages. When it is finished loading press reload, then press search and enter 'playonlinux' without the quotes. It should find it, mark it for installation and press apply. This will download and install play on linux, and the latest version of wine.

Then run playonlinux, and choose the option out of the menu bar to run the installer for firefox and silverlight.