(drinking) wine problems

[noobster]

I can't dettach from the dark side... i need a few windows programs


On another thread i asked about a linux software that played compressed archive files (e.g. mp3 album on a .rar file)... it seems there isn't one (no, Amarok doesn't support KIOs). Therefore i got foobar2000 working in wine.

The problem is that i get plenty of "glitches" with Wine. In windows playback was always smooth and sweet like ahh... smooth and sweet things

I need to do 2 things:
1) increase wine priority for the specific foobar2000 "thread"
2) deny any network access to foobar2000 (it isn't open source so...)


Problems:
P1) i'm not having any luck with nice
I tried sudoers: me ALL=(ALL) /usr/bin/nice
Also tried a shell script with suid bit set
No luck
And another thing, since linux dynamically changes processes priorities, isn't there any way to avoid that process' priority from being changed?

P2) I used Sygate in windows which gave me a lot of control over programs. With iptables things are more complicated :/
I know there is -m owner --cmd-owner but this doesn't seem to work very well.
Are there any jails (à lá BSD) in Linux?
Another option i see is creating a specific user for wine programs. But is this safe (spyware, overflows, etc)?


Thank you for your time and suggestions.

[KenJackson]

This issue was discussed here in the wine wiki. They referenced a patch which contains this comment:

// When wineserver is suid root this patch will make games that require SetThreadPriority for audio work correctly.

So maybe the patch will give you what you want. To apply it, you must download the wine source, apply the patch, compile and install.

[KenJackson]

I believe Linux implements the equivalent of BSD jails with the chroot command. Here is a somewhat old Chroot-BIND HOWTO.

I never heard of sygate before, but there are sooo many extended packet matching modules for iptables that I would be surprised if there is something you can't do. I've never tried to us 'owner' module, but I'm not even sure what the command name of a wine program would be. I wonder if it would be the windows exe name (case sensitive?, w/ or w/o .exe?) or maybe wineserver.

If you just want to spy on the process, wineshark (formerly ethereal) is a good tool that is include in major distros.

[noobster]

Thank you for your replies KenJackson. Now for the status of my situation:

I applied the patch you mentioned, the results are better than with the unstable version of the Debian package, but i still get plenty of hiccups when switching tabs in firefox or scrolling the window.

It's funny then mention suid'ing wineserver, as it doesn't work because wineserver creates a socket owned by root that needs to be accessed by the user. Still, i tried to run it as root (i'm just playing with linux ATM, after learning how to get things working i will reinstall this box) but it still didn't worked.

I think my next manhood challenge will be compiling a new kernel. I read some bits that with kernel 2.6.17 latency issues are handled better (i'm with 2.6..



Sygate is a windows firewall, not an iptables module :P
And i guess you wanted to mention wiReshark instead of wiNeshark hehe


Thanks