I’ve scoured these forums and elsewhere and I still can’t get Scrivener to activate. I’ve even purchased a new windows license because I couldn’t get the upgrade coupon using Manjaro Linux.
I’ve been through the above instructions and tried to install on both 32 and 64 architectures and I still can’t get the activation working. I’ve installed dotnet 46 and also forced 48 and nothing is working. I purged wine from my system and reinstalled everything but now the shortcuts don’t appear in my menu. I’ve had some success installing and activating ProWritingAid and I’ve created a commandline shortcut in the menu to see that.
Can someone please explain what it is I’m doing wrong here? I don’t want to have to cancel my new license and Scrivener 3 seems much better than the Beta which runs fine.
I also noticed problems with dead keys. If you don’t type accents, you may not use them much, but in French, circumflex accent is quite common and relies on a dead key modifier. The idea is that you first type ^, then e and you get **ê**. In this Wine-installed Scrivener, though, you don’t always get what you expect.
Actually, the first time you use it (let’s say you go for ^+o), you do get **ô**. The next time you try a combo with a dead key, though (say, ^+a or even "+e), you keep getting **ô**, just as if Scrivener kept stuck on the first combo it registered
Do they work in other Windows applications running in the same WINE prefix? If so, but not in Scrivener, then there’s likely a missing dependency for the various Qt library versions that Scrivener depends on. If not, then there’s something amiss with that WINE prefix.
About deadjkeys, I think the problem is some Qt library, but is something out of league. I tried a few wine installs, but all of them have the deadkey issue on Scrivener, and only on Scrivener. Notepad, notepad++, all works with deadkeys.
Another thing to try is to look at which specific version of WINE you are running. Various threads here in the forum have talked about known issues with specific versions of WINE — you may be hitting another bug.
I’ve spent months on and off trying to get Scrivener working in my Ubuntu 20.04.3. I’ve followed the instructions here to the letter and initially it looked promising but when I got to step 6 I couldn’t find any wine glass icon and nothing to do with Scrivener. It’s like it never installed onto my system, yet all the wine (V6.0.2), dotnet and scrivener installation processes seemed to run perfectly.
As I said before finding this post I’ve been trying for months to install Scrivener and it always seems to get to the same point where it looks like everything has worked but when I go to launch Scrivener there seems to be no trace of it.
Not sure what’s going on but it probably doesn’t help that I’m not an expert Linux user.
Any advice for what I can do to see if Scrivener has installed at all or just disappeared into the aether? Many thanks.
I’ve been using Linux since the Mandrake/Mandriva days, and I played around with Scivener and Wine, then Scrivener and Crossover, and there were always problems. For me, the solution is VirtualBox; it works wonderfully, and for those that refuse to send MS a dollar, windows works fine unregistered with only a minimal amount of nags.
Which menu are you talking about here: Go to Menu>Wine and click the wine glass icon for “Scrivener.” ?
I don’t seem to be able to open Wine itself as an app, only Winetricks, which doesn’t have a menu.
Also, do I need to install a special 32 bit version of Wine? I just used sudo apt install winehq-staging --install-recommends -y which gave me 7.7
I did steps 1-5 but just double-clicking on the .exe file doesn’t run it.
Hi @zizajaun
I would certainly suggest reinstalling wine using stable in place of staging. That should give you wine 7.0 which is more likely to work (particularly with dotnet). My installation used Wine 7.0 not 7.7 and worked without problems.
The following packages have unmet dependencies.
winehq-stable : Depends: wine-stable (= 7.0.0.0~focal-1)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
I think this could be because before I accidentally installed the repository for Focal Fossa instead of Jammy Jellyfish. But I’ve checked in etc/apt and only Jammy files are there now. When I run apt policy it lists the repositories, including some Focal ones, but I’m not sure how to remove them. This page says to do sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:<PPA_NAME> but I’m not sure what part of the apt info is the name.
I am afraid that I can’t help very much here except with some general advice. The problem is probably that you upgraded to Jammy too soon (it only came out a week ago). I am still using Fossa, and will do so until the direct upgrade is possible in August. From what I have read, in the version that will be released in August (22.04.1), many of the problems of dependencies and repositories have been resolved.
My guess is that in August (maybe before) the stable version of Wine will become compatible with Jammy. If you can wait, then that is one solution. The other, would be to reinstall your whole system with Focal and wait till August to upgrade properly. Depending on what else you are doing, that might be too drastic. Please note that I am not an expert in Linux (or even Ubuntu).
It might be that someone in the forum who knows more could suggest a better solution, but I am afraid that I cannot.
Thank you, CookDaddy, for your straightforward guide. Installed and activated x64 version successfully on Fedora 35. Even scrivx files are opened directly in Scrivener upon double click right from where they are stored, which I didn’t expect, tbh.
One question, though. I’m not familiar with Wine. I realise that Windows applications under Linux are a foreign concept, but is it supposed to look this ugly? Is there maybe a way to make at least font in the editor look smooth?
Hello, @Jaaaarne !
I’ve just posted some tips in the other topic regarding the installation of the version 3.1.1.
The font is looking ugly in the editor because the default font in Scrivener for Windows is the “Sitka”, a font that comes with windows and is probably missing in your OS and Wine. This can be changed for a native font of your OS and it’ll look smooth (change in the project preferences, so all new documents will have the same look).
You can also change all the fonts on the Scrivener Options to the same fonts of the operational system and it will look like a native Linux software, totally and perfectly integrated with your desktop. Smooth and flawless.
Thank you for your recs, but changing fonts didn’t help. However, turning subpixel antialiasing on did the trick, at least when running Scrivener under Wine (I don’t see any difference on native applications).
Yes, you’re right. I first installed it in a Manjaro Linux, that I believe already installs wine with subpixel antialiasing on and everything was perfect. My texts were looking strange and a font change did the job.
Later I tested it on another machine with Ubuntu 22.04 and indeed the fonts look ugly. How do you turn on this feature?
@CookDaddy Thank you. I have a 32 bit version of Scrivener up and running in Mint. Couldn’t have done it without your walk through so thanks again.
It looks like an older version of Scrivener but I’ve opened the files I’ve just written on my Windows 64 bit version and so far all seems okay. I saved them in Dropbox so they can be accessed by both devices. No issues noted.
Is there maybe a way to make at least font in the editor look smooth?