EAC in Linux under Wine

This article is here to provide tips for getting EAC to work in linux under Wine.

Wine is an application layer that allows you to run Windows-based programs under linux.

EAC 1.0b3 will run under Wine, but you will need to do some tweaking.

Specific instructions will be provided specifically for the gentoo distribution, but these instructions can be adapted for use in other distributions such as Ubuntu.

Prerequisites

• Install Wine. EAC 1.0b3 has been tested to work with wine-1.3.37.
• Download EAC.

Installing Wine

Install Wine on your distro.

For gentoo, using the following commands will install the newest (marked unstable) amd64 version:

$ echo "app-emulation/wine" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
$ emerge wine

Once installed it will need to be configured. Run `winecfg` from the terminal.

Wine will start up a gui dialog. There's only one thing that has to be configured here, and that's the cdrom:

1. Go to the Drives tab.
2. Click the Add button. It will ask you for a drive letter, pick one and click OK.
3. The new letter will appear in the Drive mappings dialog. Click on it.
4. In the Path edit box, enter "/mnt/cdrom" without the quotes.
5. Click the Show Advanced... button and make sure Type is set to Autodetect. *
6. Click OK to save the settings and exit.

* If you set this to CD-ROM you probably don't even need to insert a data disc before starting EAC. Try it. But make sure your fstab is set up correctly. (see below)

An optional item to be configured is under Desktop Intregation - under that tab you can specify where the My Documents folders and the like are mapped to under your current filesystem.

Adding a new fstab entry for the cdrom drive

Most distros use udev and automount for cdrom drives. Unfortunately Wine seems to be a bit grumpy about using automount points.

The easiest way to get around this is to create a new fstab entry under /etc/fstab:


/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,ro,user 0 0

and then make sure the mount point exists:


$ mkdir /mnt/cdrom

Installing EAC

Change to the directory that you downloaded EAC to and run it:


$ cd ~/Downloads
$ wine eac-1.0beta3.exe

The installer will pop up. Follow the guide in the wiki here to install it.

Preparing EAC for the first run

An interesting bug was discovered on the first run. It seems Wine doesn't auto-register some DLLs under the install directory. They have to be manually registered or EAC will segfault when run:


$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Exact\ Audio\ Copy/
$ regsvr32 sql*

If you want to encode to mp3 you'll need the Windows binary of LAME, get it and move lame.exe and lame_enc.dll into the EAC folder.

Starting EAC

There is a bit of an issue starting EAC under Wine. More specifically, it will not detect your CDROM drive unless you have a data CD in the drive and mounted. If you do not do this the device list will be empty.

Insert any old data CD and mount it:


$ mount /mnt/cdrom

Ensure that it is mounted before starting EAC. To do that, just type 'mount' with no options and it will show you what's currently mounted on your system.

Then you can start EAC (either by menu or through the terminal):


$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Exact\ Audio\ Copy/
$ wine EAC.exe

EAC will start. It should show the drive with the data track of the disc you've inserted. Now you can unmount and eject it:


$ umount /mnt/cdrom
$ eject /dev/cdrom

After that you should be able to insert any audio disc and EAC will recognize it. You also should not need to manually eject via the terminal either. Rip away!

Other tips

Now you can configure EAC as per this guide in the wiki. Some tips:

• If you get weird errors when starting EAC about ASPI configuration, check that your user is in the 'cdrom' group, and add the user if not. You may need to login again to enable your new group settings.
• Don't forget to put in an email for freedb. It'll fail otherwise.
• Don't submit your drive information after testing! EAC will ask you to, but it may hang!
• The guide will say to not save rips to folders containing your name. Linux stores all user files under /home/<username> and generally will not let users write anywhere else. Make sure your real name is not your username!
• You can always create a new "drive" using winecfg, which is like a link to a folder using the MS terminology (C: D: ,...). You can for instance have a "L:" drive which is in fact your /home/<username>/Music folder.
• You can run native linux binarys from wine (e.g. your encoder!). However EAC has some path checker on the encoder path and therefor it will deny simply putting /usr/bin/flac there. Despite that you can trick wine to accept this by putting C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe into the program path field and alter your command line to look like this: /c /usr/bin/flac [your options] where "[your options]" is the prior content of that field.