Got most of what I want in AntiX now, but in order to use JWPce (Japanese word-proocessor for native English speakers) I need to install wine. I've searched the repos for this without success - but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places. wine has been around for some years, so I'd expect there to be a stable package for it. Don't say I have to untangle a tarball . . .

I believe wine 1.2.3 is the latest, but I'd be quite happy with wine 1, if it's available.

the package maintainer of wine for debian is no longer working on it so there is no version for testing/wheezy (antix default repos). there is a wine version in stable/squeeze that works but it's old and another in sid/unstable that is full of bugs. edit your sources.list in /etc/apt/ or use synaptic to enable one of those repos and install wine. (after you are done disable them again) another alternative is to use this for a more up-to-date version of wine
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/"
linktext was:"http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/"
====================================

Thanks for that prompt and helpful answer. I'll seek out the older version first, as it sounds like the one that's worked for me before, and post again once it's up and running.

Update: despite a thorough search of the repos, I didn't find either the one in stable/squeeze or the one in sid, so I followed the link for the latest (1.3.31), downloaded all the relevant i386 deb packages and installed them. It works, I'm pleased to say. It doesn't handle JWPce's Help files, but I believe that's not unusual and I don't need them anyway.

JWPce works from the command line, but brings up"File not found" when trying to run it from Menu > Applications, although having looked at the log I'm convinced that's neither a wine nor a JWPce problem. There's always something else to deal with . . .

You will probably need to edit the /usr/share/applications .desktop file for wine/JWPce

Aah, thanks for the tip! I think the answer is that there are two JWPce.desktop files in my user area, and the one in ~/JWPce/Desktop is inherited from another system and points to a file which doesn't exist on this one. Therefore, my poor system is trying to find a file that ain't there. Yes, a bit of judicious editing should sort that out. If it doesn't, then I know what to remove before re-installing JWPce.

Everything comes to him who waits . . . after the previous post last October, I eventually gave up trying to sort this out and ran JWPce from the command line - but after a few weeks it would not display Japanese characters and so became useless. Later on, it worked again from the cmd line, probably as a result of one of those hundreds of updates - someone has been very busy up there in MEPIS-land!

I long ago stopped even trying to run it from the menu, though, until today when I idlly clicked on the desktop icon and found that it works. Once again, I suspect that one of those many updates has fixed it. My thanks to whoever was responsible.

good to hear that. also if you want the latest version of wine enable the liquorix repos and install it from there.

Thanks for the tip. Looks as though things have moved on in the past twelve months. Being a bit of a pessimist, though, I'll settle for what I've got . . . until it gives any bother, in which case I'll go for the later version.