In the midst of horrendous catastrophes unfolding around the world, here are two little first-world fixes to help resolve issues of minor consequence. Note that both solutions are somewhat flawed, echoing our collective attempts to resolve humanity’s larger problems.
First, a solution for the would-be writers among you who have been following Writeside’s posts on running Scrivener 3 on Linux and have recently run into problems on older hardware. A small group to be sure, but if running Scrivener with Wine has recently stopped working for you and attempts to start Scrivener from the command line have resulted in this
Error of failed request: GLXBadFBConfig
there is still a workaround, courtesy of the Wine forums. Create a text file (without the .txt extension) named .pam_environment and place it in your home directory. The file should contain this line:
MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5
and nothing else. Now, log out of your Linux session and then log back in. Scrivener should now work. The catch? Electron apps, such as the Min web browser, will stop working. A klutzy “solution”: move the .pam_environment file out of your home directory (onto your desktop, for example) when you want to run Electron apps and move it back into your home directory when you want to run Scrivener.
Pretty half-assed, isn’t it? Welcome to the way the world works, as per Afghanistan, U. S. infrastructure and climate change.
The second update is more straightforward. Recently, a mail plugin for WordPress (which this site runs on) got a little carried away and sent multiple instances of the last Writeside post, understandably annoying a number of subscribers. To be fair, it was more my fault than the plugin’s, as I draft these posts on a number of machines, all of which are perfectly capable of using WordPress to send mail even when I don’t want that to occur. I’ve tried to resolve this with another WordPress plugin (the aptly named Disable Emails) and I now intend to outsource emails to subscribers using the ubiquitous Mailchimp. This is the free version, so you’ll see lots of Mailchimp branding. But ideally you will only receive one email for each Writeside post, a much-needed improvement. You’ll also be able to choose text- or HTML-formatted email, and you’ll find it much easier to unsubscribe (not that I want you to do that).
So there you have it: two tiny, imperfect solutions to minor problems affecting a small number of people. This is how progress takes place.
Thanks for all your posts on getting Scrivener to run on Wine.
I managed to get it to work by installing wine, rebooting (something Linux users are not accustomed to but it seemed to matter) then installing Scrivener 3 off the installation .exe file.
My registration failed but I only tried once and I’ll get back to that. Meanwhile, I have a different probelms. I’m using 4K monitors, so the default words (in menus, everywhere) tends to be tiny (there are limits in KDE as to how much this can be adjusted). Wine config can be adjusted to make most of the words in all the places become normal size. But, the words in the Scrivener 3 editor do not scale up. Zooming simply changes the width of the space the words are in, not the size of the words. Presumably one can in crease font size (not a good solution for me).
I believe there are some Scrivener 3 installations out there on actual Windows where this also happens, so there may be a bug in Scrivener 3 that is only rarely revealed.
I’ve got Scrivener on both a Windows laptop and an older Mac, so I can sit back and watch this evolve over time. But I do like the idea of being able to use Scrivener on my main computer, with my nice 4K monitors.
Someday…
Again, thanks for your great work on this.
The zooming problem disappeared when I selected different fonts. The font that Scrivener running in wine defaulted to was something I’d not seen before and apparently does not scale. Easily fixed.
Much eInk has been spilled over how to get the registration to work. The problem may be this simple: If one copies and pastes the lic. code from the L&L email to the registration box in Scrivener on Wine, something goes wonky and it is not correctly transferred. Type it in manually, and Bob’s your uncle.
Thanks for this information, Greg. Each new iteration of Scrivener for Windows seems to introduce minor issues with Wine, but thus far it seems possible to adjust fairly easily. Kudos to L&L for reasonable consistency in this regard. It’s good to hear you have everything working to your satisfaction now.