Thank you to everyone who responded attempting to help. I discovered several facts which were not clear to me before and might be of use to people having problems in the future. (Maybe some of these belong in the FAQ ?) 1) What Canonical's Synaptic package manager lists as wine-1.3 is actually wine-1.4 (or the wine --version command is lying to me.) Lesson: Trust what wine says about itself, not what the distributor says. 2) Attempting to execute a windows program from the GUI (i.e. right-mouse click on a file and select Open with Wine Windows Program Loader) isn't a very useful way to execute a program, especially if you are just trying it out for the first time. Wine seems to respond much better if you launch it from the CLI. In the case of Galactic Civilizations, it won't work from the GUI and works fine from the CLI. The suggestion to CD to the directory before running was also news to me. Even discounting the ability to post debugging information to this forum, the CLI is just more likely to work, at least in my limited experience. 3) Wanting an icon I can click on, I use a text editor to create script to launch the program as I would from the CLI, which saves keystrokes and returns the user to the desired simple interface. Just save the script file to your desktop. 4) The execute bit cannot be set on a CD-ROM file. There is probably an appropriate way to do this, perhaps "wine start executable.exe", but my solution was simply to copy the CD to the local filesystem and load it from there. Again, this is a simple solution to what might be a common newbie problem that could be in the FAQ. There should be (or if there is, I couldn't find it) a basic set of instructions on how a newbie might go about loading a Windows program and running it from his Linux box. I assume the concept of having more people support the database with apps they have tested is desired, so helping them get started is a useful thing in general. Perhaps I will write such a file. Meanwhile I'm going to sign up in the app database as being a tester for GalCiv.
