adding dolmades to the right branch this time, oups

Author: vsoch

_posts/recipes/2017-06-02-dolmades.md

@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
+---
+title:  "Dolmades: Windows Apps under Linux using Singularity"
+category: recipes
+permalink: dolmades-windows-containers
+---
+
+## Introduction
+Recently I've found several reasons why Windows containers fit in nicely in our Linux-dominated environments:
+
+- You actually do have <a href="https://github.com/CHPC-UofU/Singularity-ubuntu-wine-peakselector" target="_blank"> a scientific application</a> which is exclusively available for windows
+- How about installing and running MS Office inside a safe environment?
+- Do you own Windows games you always wanted to play under Linux?
+- Your tax reporting software runs under Windows only?
+
+That's why I initiated a project called <a href="http://dolmades.org" target="_blank">dolmades</a> which should bring portable and sustainable windows applications to linux users.
+Its goal is to provide stable recipes for people who are interested in regularily using one or only a few particular windows application. 
+For that purpose VMs and dual-booting bear a huge overhead in both performance and ressources.
+Another approach is to use <a href="https://winehq.org" target="_blank">wine</a>, a wrapper that redirects Windows system calls into native Linux system calls and allows execution of native Windows binaries under supported platforms (Unix with X, just recently Android).
+
+So, why don't we formulate the following equation: wine + singularity = dolmades ?
+
+
+## About
+This document describes how to get a dolmade running in which one or several windows apps can be installed temporarily or permanently. 
+Both a Singularity Hub and a Docker Hub image template is readily available and supports plenty of win apps already without further modification needed.
+
+## Requirements
+This tutorial uses singularity 2.3 which is all what you will need to have installed. 
+The game which is being installed is freely downloadable.
+Normal user privileges will suffice provided you install your software into the proper location.
+
+## Example Dolmade
+Let's pull the dolmades docker image. Alternatively, you can use the shub image.
+
+``` 
+singularity pull docker://c1t4r/dolmades 
+```
+
+This image comes with Ubuntu 16.04 and has the winehq PPA enabled. 
+It has wine version 2.0.1 (current stable) installed and some additional packages which are needed
+to run some DX9 games.
+
+Now, extend the size of the image and execute its run script in read-write mode:
+
+```
+singularity expand -s 1500 dolmades.img
+singularity exec -w dolmades.img /singularity
+```
+
+This will do the following in ```/tmp```:
+
+1. Check if a wine prefix exists from a previous run? If yes: restore it, if no: initialize it. 
+   The wine prefix is kind of a chroot location for wine apps and where the windows user profiles and their apps are being stored.
+2. Download and install DirectX9
+3. Start a new shell
+4. Prints the instructions to manually download and install Broken Sword 2.5 (a nice, free adventure game)
+5. After you are done, test it and finally exit the shell.
+6. The profile will be saved under `/PROFILES`, the game under `/APPS`.
+
+***NOTE:*** it is important to call the EXE from its directory or else it will fail!
+
+``` 
+wine ./bsengine.exe 
+```
+
+Expand the size of your container further or use a new one to try out other windows games or apps!
+
+If you are unsure if an app will install or work properly you can test that without modifying the container. 
+Simply start it read-only:
+
+``` 
+./dolmades.img # or singularity run dolmades.img 
+```
+
+Once you have figured out how to install and make an app work you repeat the steps in rw-mode.
+Often, some registry entries need to be tweaked or some builtin DLLs substituted by native ones.
+
+That can be often done using the tool `winetricks`. Some more settings can be tweaked using the tool ```winecfg```.
+
+## Resources
+
+This is the ```Dockerfile``` to build the dolmades docker image
+{% include gist.html username='katakombi' id='6ce5690804beefaeb83abe2f3c946b08' file='Dockerfile' %}
+
+This is the <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/katakombi/dolmades/master/Singularity" target="_blank">link</a> to the singularity hub dolmades build spec file which also contains the run script.
+
+Dolmades are still in the early stages and there are many challenges to tackle before we seize the potential over using wine on Linux systems directly.
+If this speaks to you then send me your feedback or questions, and check my <a href="http://dolmades.org">project page</a> for screen shots of further examples.