Vitaliy Alexeyev

synshell · Compatibility · syn-wine-helper

Wine components

Wine components for the synshell desktop — DLLs that Wine itself does not have (MFC, Visual Basic runtimes, OpenAL), installed once for all prefixes and offered when a program needs them.

READMEAUR package: syn-wine-helper-binAUR package: syn-wine-helper-git
Missing components

Features

  • Components — MFC 4.2 to MFC 14, ATL 7.0, C++ 2022 threads, Visual Basic 5 and 6 runtimes, OpenAL Soft; x86 and x64 where available.
  • One copy for all prefixes — DLLs go to $XDG_DATA_HOME/syn-wine/dlls, not into each Wine prefix.
  • Asked when needed — when a program fails to start because of a missing DLL, Wine calls the helper: a window lists what is missing, installs it and starts the program again.
  • Video and audio codecs — when a program cannot play a video or sound format, the window offers the GStreamer packages that handle it (installed with pacman, administrator password required).
  • From the original redistributables — files are downloaded from the vendors' installers, checked by SHA-256 and unpacked by the helper itself (CAB, MSI, NSIS, ZIP); nothing extra has to be installed.
  • Check without running — scan reads a program's imports and tells which DLLs are missing and which package has them.
  • Own packages — add or replace entries in $XDG_DATA_HOME/syn-wine/packages.toml.
  • 14 languages — the UI follows the system language.
Components Video and audio
Components Video and audio

Automatic questions about missing DLLs and codecs need synshell's own Wine build (crates/syn-wine), which also looks for DLLs in the shared directory.

Install

Arch Linux (AUR) — x86_64 and aarch64:

yay -S syn-wine-helper-bin      # prebuilt
yay -S syn-wine-helper-git      # built from source

The whole desktop: yay -S synshell-bin. From source: cargo build --release -p syn-wine-helper in the synshell repository.

Command line

syn-wine-helper                           # window with the list of components
syn-wine-helper list                      # packages and what is installed
syn-wine-helper install mfc42 vb6run      # by package id or DLL name
syn-wine-helper install msvbvm60.dll --arch x86
syn-wine-helper remove mfc42
syn-wine-helper scan Game.exe             # which DLLs would be missing
syn-wine-helper run Game.exe              # check, offer what is missing, start in Wine
syn-wine-helper probe setup.exe           # which DLLs are inside an installer

Part of synshell

syn-wine-helper is one of the applications of synshell — a Wayland desktop environment in Rust for computers and phones, built on the syngui UI framework.

License

GPL-3.0-only