Nick Congleton It’s probably best to think of WINE prefixes sort of like virtual machines. They’re not virtual machines, but they do behave somewhat similarly. A WINE prefix is a folder that contains all of the WINE configurations as well as all of the Windows pieces that WINE uses for compatibility, including libraries and a registry. The default WINE prefix is ~/.wine, but different and multiple prefixes can be used.
Many programs work under WINE with absolutely no configuration. The second WINE is installed, it can flawlessly run them. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, and applications are constantly being updated, so the list of flawless applications is always changing. It’s a good thing that WINE can be configured to accommodate potentially troublesome programs.
There are two main utilities for doing so, winecfg and winetricks. This guide will cover the former, and a future guide will handle the latter. Most of the time, though, winecfg is enough to get an application running.
winecfg is a graphical utility. Different distributions and desktop environments handle WINE and WINE applications differently, so the easiest way to open it up on any distribution is to run winecfg in a terminal.
When the application opens, you will notice a plain window with seven or eight tabs, depending on which version of WINE you’re running. The eighth tab is “Staging,” and like the name suggests, is only available when the staging patches have been applied to WINE.
There are plenty of reasons why people would need to encrypt a partition. Whether they’re rooted it privacy, security, or confidentiality, setting up a basic encrypted partition on a Linux system is fairly easy. This is especially true when using LUKS, since its functionality is built directly into the kernel.
On both Debian and Ubuntu, the cryptsetup utility is easily available in the repositories. The same should be true for Mint or any of their other derivatives.
$ sudo apt-get install cryptsetup
NVIDA supports Linux with its proprietary drivers nearly as well as it does Windows. That said, it’s no secret that NVIDIA has long been the go-to choice for gaming on Linux. Unfortunately, even though the drivers support Linux well, installing them can become more complicated when dealing with different distributions. In many cases, the process is very simple but not well documented. In others, it’s a bit tougher, but there is no reason that you can’t get the latest NVIDIA drivers for your graphics card working on most major distributions.
Many people rely on proprietary chat solutions like Skype, but those solutions pose serious concerns for both privacy and security. Additionally, development of the Skype Linux client has been unpredictable at best, even stalling for a number of years, only to resume just recently.
Django is easily the most popular web framework written in Python. It strikes a delicate balance between feature completeness and efficiency, including powerful features like automatic migration generation and a full-featured admin interface. Setting up a Django development environment in Ubuntu is fairly easy, and can be done in only a few steps.
It’s best to use a Python virtual environment when developing in a complex framework like Django, especially if you intend to work on multiple projects at once. It’s also probably a good idea to make sure that you have both versions of Python up to date.
$ sudo apt-get install virtualenv python python3
In a relatively short time, Discord has become the favorite chat solution among gamers. That’s a fairly good thing. It’s easy to use and well supported across all platforms. Well, not quite. If you go to the Discord website at the time of writing this, there is one glaring omission from Discord’s list of available clients, Linux.
However, the Discord developers do plan on supporting Linux and have even released an experimental ‘canary’ version that you can install and use now. It’s definitely not perfect, but it does work fairly well, and, if you’re a gamer, why miss out?
Since there are multiple available versions of WINE, there are different ways to install it as well. Of course, each distribution also packages and ships WINE differently, and most only ship one or two versions of it. Thankfully, there are third party repositories available, and, when all else fails, WINE can be compiled from source. Unless you’re running Gentoo, source should probably be the last resort, since it’s obviously harder to maintain, but it can work in cases where you want a custom WINE build that isn’t packaged for your distro.
The ability to monitor the temperatures of key components is important, whether you’re gaming, overclocking, or doing something more businesslike and running a critical server. Linux includes modules in the kernel that allow it to access onboard sensors within components. Though, that alone is not enough.
There is a program that does work in conjunction with those modules to display the readings of those sensors in the userspace. That program is lm_sensors. Lm_sensors allows users to get a readout of sensor readings in the command line and interfaces with several graphical front ends that make displaying temperatures in real time automatic and easy.
Lm_sensors is in nearly every distro’s repositories. In most cases, installation is as simple as a single command. Since it lm_sensors is a daemon, it will need to be started in all distributions, but the Debian based ones, which start it automatically.
$ sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
# apt-get install lm-sensors
One of the main concerns for people making the switch to Linux is how to run the programs that they’ve become accustomed to on other operating systems, mainly Windows. For most, there are one or two programs of games that aren’t available on Linux, and that puts a major hold on adopting Linux full time. Thankfully, WINE can help to solve this problem. 
WINE is a piece of software for Unix-like systems, including Linux, OSX, and the BSDs, that allows you to run native Windows applications. WINE stands for, WINE Is Not an Emulator. That’s because it isn’t. WINE isn’t a full Windows install or some kind of VM. It is a compatibility layer that essentially translates Windows binaries. This extends to graphics libraries like DirectX 9, which is converted to OpenGL. WINE allows Linux users to run many popular Windows applications and games at similar performance to if they were running on Windows itself.
Linux has a ton of options when it comes to media players. Many of them are just as feature packed as their proprietary counterparts on other operating systems. What most Linux users don’t realize is that there are additional options that utilize one of Linux’s greatest strengths, servers. MPD(Music Player Daemon) is a lightweight server for sharing a music library both locally and over a network.
The best aspect of MPD is, by far, its flexibility. Not only does MPD allow music to be shared and played over the network, but it also allows for numerous different front end clients. These clients range from full graphical music players to minimal command line options.
Sure, VirtualBox is a popular solution for quick and easy virtualization on Linux, but KVM can provide a more robust and efficient solution with minimal configuration. With the use of tools like Virt-Manager, it can be just as easy to use.
