I've been using There (virtual world, like Second Life for people with ordinary computers) since 2004, running the Windows client in Wine since There reopened in 2011. For the past three-plus years, I've been running it in Kubuntu 14.04, on my desktop machine (Core2Quad homebuilt) and for two years, my old laptop (Dell Latitude D520); I installed on both systems, most recently about three years ago, using the instructions here.
Recently, I've acquired a much newer laptop, and installed Ubuntu Mate 16.04.3, and I'm trying to install There on this one (and I'll soon need to do so on my desktop system, which will be switched to either Ubuntu Mate 16.04 or Ubuntu Mate 18.04 after an upcoming hardware upgrade).
Correct operation of There is dependent on installing Internet Explorer, versions 6, 7, or 8 (7 is preferred for performance reasons, but it will work with any of the three) -- or, I presume, some components supplied by those which are present in newer versions of Windows, since the client installed smoothly and runs perfectly on Windows 10 on my "new" laptop).
At present, however, whenever I try to use winetricks to install any of these versions of Internet Explorer, I get errors -- generally, a sha1sum error, after which Winetricks advised me to rename a file created during the aborted installation and try again. Following directions, in this case, results in a loop -- same result, over and over, with all three versions.
As far as I know, I have the most current version of winetricks. I'm using PlayOnLinux instead of Wine directly, because it makes installing Microsoft components easier, automatically segregates different Wine versions needed for different Windows programs, and past experience suggests I might have to try several versions of Wine to find one that works best with There -- currently, I have Wine 2.22 selected.
Complicating this is that Makena (publisher/operator of There) has cut staff so much (trying to operate at a profit, or at least break-even, with only a few hundred users) that the staff member who helped me last time I did this is no longer employed with There -- and Wine installation was never officially supported in any case.
If I can't get There to work in current and future versions of Ubuntu (and establish a general method of doing so), I may have to give up a virtual world where I've been a member for fourteen years, since I can't/won't depend on rebooting into Windows for a single program. Getting There working under Wine was the "killer app" for my original transition from Windows to Linux -- I'd be saddened to find I can no longer keep it working.
Bottom line question: how can I get winetricks to successfully install Internet Explorer (preferably version 7, but 6 or 8 would be acceptable), so I can make There work?
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