SlingPlayer (Slingbox Client) on the Asus EEE

This is a quick guide on how to set up the Slingbox client (SlingPlayer.exe) on the ASUS EEE’s default Xandros operating system using WINE. This guide is indented for beginners and experts alike but as with everything out there, please understand what you are doing and make sure you back up everything as you go along!

Step One: Opening another bottle

As with most things in life, this guide kicks off with some WINE, in this case we are going to be installing the latest build available from WineHQ which happens to be 0.9.52. If you already have WINE installed on your EEE then you can skip his section. Incase you are unaware, WINE is a compatibility layer which, in a nutshell, allows you to run (some) Windows applications under Linux. We are going to add the WINE APT repository to our APT Sources, so that when new WINE builds are released we are automatically kept up-to-date.

• Opening a Terminal

To open a Terminal window on the Asus EEE, press the CONTROL, ALT and T keys at the same time. A new black window should appear, enter the following commands into it:

• Adding the WINE APT Repo GPG Key

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

(Make sure you select all the code above, as it can overflow on narrow screens (like on the EEE!)). The code above will download the .gpg key from budgetdedicated.com (which is where WINE hosts its repos) and add it to your list of trusted sources)

• Adding the WINE APT Repos to your Sources

wget -q sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

(Again, Make sure you select all the code above, as it can overflow on narrow screens (like on the EEE!)). The code above will create a new APT entry in your sources, the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list can always be removed in the future if you want to stop using WINE.

If you are having trouble following the above two steps, you can get the instructions for adding the WINE Repo’s in Debian Etch 4 (aka Xandros) direct from WineHQ.

• Installing WINE from APT

You are now ready to install WINE using APT. First you need to update the list of APT Packages with apt-get update:

sudo apt-get update

Next you want to actually install the WINE package:

sudo apt-get install wine

Once WINE is installed you will be ready to move on to the next step:

Installing SlingPlayer

Before you can start installing SlingPlayer you will need to configure WINE and register the required dll files that SingPlayer expects.

• Registering SlingPlayer DLLs

First off you will need to download the SlingPlayer Dependancies zip file, this file contains various components and libraries which are installed by default on Windows XP, but are not part of the WINE default bundle. This zip file has been kindly created and hosted by the Sling Community, so go give them some love.

Once you have downloaded these files, you need to copy them to your WINE System32 folder and register them with the WINE Windows Registry (it’s times like this that you really appreciate how wonderful Windows really is…). Extract the .zip file to your desktop and them copy the following files to /home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.

• msxml3.dll
• qcap.dll
• quartz.dll
• msxml3r.dll
• dxdiagn.dll

You can copy these files by using the Terminal: (the following example assumes your username is “jonny” and you extracted the SlingPlayer Dependencies file to your desktop, modify to suit your enviroment.