The connection of Wine and PlayOnLinux
I'm about to install wine on my new ubuntu 10.10 installation, however I can't determaine if I should install Wine or PlayOnLinux. I've already read over the following page http://wiki.winehq.org/PlayOnLinux, however the differences are not very clear and I don't understand if I just have to install Wine or both or just PlayOnLinux.
Also could someone tell me if PlayOnLinux is an add-on for Wine or not? If it is then it would certainly clear a lot for me. And do I need winetricks?
PlayOnLinux is an interesting project set to overcome some of the issue that Wine Development has. Since supporting Windows applications isn't a science, one Windows application may work flawlessly in Wine 0.9.1 but become defunct in 0.9.2 due to an update in Wine to make another program work. There is typically also a lot of tweaks that need to be made to make programs that aren't Platinum status work properly. PlayOnLinux solves all that by setting up individual Wine versions and Prefixes for each game - using the best version of wine, and applying all the tweaks, that make it work as best as possible.
In short, you can certainly install POL and Wine side-by-side without any troubles. Items that aren't in the POL library will just be installed using whatever Wine environment you have setup.
I personally use POL exclusively.
Imho there is no need for using Wine in addition to POL. POL offers a way of manually adding software that is not yet supported by POL-Scripts (the installation scripts that should do the configuration of the installation process for every software individually) and you have many tools built in like the registry editor for editing the registry values of any installed software, winetricks and many more.
But the most important convenience for me is the possibility to simply switch beetween installed wine versions (say you installed four applications with four different wine versions in four different prefixes (well, you didin't - the POL scripts did) then you can switch the wine version for any application to "system" (using system default) to any other version that was used before by POL).This is really convenient.
I don't see any reason for using plain wine in addition to POL.
my 2c, piedro