Any Docker for Wine experience?

[aussiemartin]

Hi,
I run a Windows VM locally 24x7 (I'm on macOS) which runs a single light-weight Windows app for website ranking tracking purposes.

I'd love to be able to move his onto my Synology and would prefer the small Docker experience, to running a VM.

Has anyone successfully installed and using Wine, in Docker on their Synology? I was looking at the Docker image at Docker Hub since it's got 500K+ installs and looks to be regularly updated.

I have had a few attempts myself. I lack the Docker experience for setting it up correctly but did get it to work once, and installed the app I'm wanting. Sadly, for some reason, Docker crashed my NAS hence this request, to you folks.

For my attempts (using the mentioned image), I was lost knowing what all the variables were, the correct values, and even where to add them - i.e. no idea on the hostname variables or the /bin/bash argument and where all these are configured.

I also noticed that I had no idea where new files and data were being stored. I need to know that since the app also produces reports that I need to copy out. Wine didn't appear to create anything in the Synology Docker folder.

Can anyone help me out? I'd have thought Wine would be a popular Docker but searching these forums only resulted in 2 unrelated results.
Cheers and thanks
Martin

 

[one-eyed-king]

If I am not mistaken, this image seems to be a base image for creating your own image.

Running the container itself might appear to be tricky for an unexperienced user, though it realy is not. You just need to make sure you use RDP_SERVER=yes, because X11 redirection is not available on the Syno.

The documentation mentions this "one-shot" approach, which will keep the container running as long as the shell remains open:

docker run -it \
    --rm \
    --hostname="$(hostname)" \
    --env="RDP_SERVER=yes" \
    --publish="3389:3389/tcp" \
    scottyhardy/docker-wine /bin/bash

Of course this is not what you want, if the container should keep running.

Removing the -it (interactive terminal) and --rm (remove container when exited) and adding -d (detached mode) does help here:

docker run -d \
    --name docker-wine \
    --hostname="$(hostname)" \
    --env="RDP_SERVER=yes" \
    --publish="3389:3389/tcp" \
    scottyhardy/docker-wine tail -f /dev/null

The additional --name argument gives the container a friendly name in the ui.
Furthermore I had to replace /bin/bash (which only keeps the container running with -it) with tail -f /dev/null to keep the container running. If you create your own image with your application pre-installed, this should be the command required to run your application.

To connect the RDP Session, you simply use mstsc.exe and point it to the nas-ip or hostname. Default username/password is wineuser. It will drop your straight into the xserver running inside the container.

Thus said, how did you install your windows application in the container?

update: I missed out on you beeing on a mac. I have no idea what the mac equivalent of mstsc.exe is. I would be surprised if there is no compatible mac client for RDP connections.

update2: fixed some typos

 

[Rusty]

update: I missed out on you beeing on a mac. I have no idea what the mac equivalent of mstsc.exe is. I would be surprised if there is no compatible mac client for RDP connection.

There is an official MS RDP app so that will not be a problem

 

[aussiemartin]

OK thanks so much for this initial config.
I installed the Windows using the images pre-installed Firefox browser - downloaded it and ran the installer.
The issue at the moment is Wine tells me now that it's updating Wine's winuser after running the installer but I have no idea where that is and the program did not install, that I can see

Did you use this to install anything, with your testing?
Thanks again for becoming involved, very appreciated

 

[one-eyed-king]

I just took a small peak into that.

My first attempt was to run wine notepad, which just seem to have installed/prepared (not sure what exactly happend there) notepad. When I executed the command wine notepad the notpad application actualy opened.

For my second attempt I tried WinSCP. Though, whenever I try to run the installer, this error is raised: 00bc:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow The explorer process failed to start.

In my third attempt I tried your way: download in firefox and open it from there. The installer openend and seem to make a clean installation, but WinWSCP doesn't open.

I would suggest to open an issue in the github project and ask the maintainer how to archive what you want to do.

-- post merged: 21. Mar 2022 --

I tried again using the stable-7.0 tag and now WinSCP works for me:

docker run -d -t \
    --name docker-wine \
    --hostname="$(hostname)" \
    --env="RDP_SERVER=yes" \
    --publish="3389:3389/tcp" \
   scottyhardy/docker-wine:stable-7.0

Note: I removed tail -f /dev/null as it delayed container stop by a lot and added -t to keep the container running instead.