Running wine fails with X Error of failed request: XF86VidModeExtensionDisabled

Submitted Tue May 26 17:45:05 2009 under tags "wine,linux,technology,computers"

I discovered, after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04, that wine no longer worked for me. I received this error:

    X Error of failed request: XF86VidModeExtensionDisabled
     Major opcode of failed request: 135 (XFree86-VidModeExtension)
     Minor opcode of failed request: 6 (XF86VidModeGetAllModeLines)
     Serial number of failed request: 76
     Current serial number in output stream: 76
There are a couple of pages that suggest editing .wine/config. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked for 5 years. You need to edit the WINE registry to fix the problem. You do that by running "winecfg." Winecfg also fails with that error. Apparently winecfg is a wine program. Thus, if wine has a problem and can't start, you can't use winecfg to fix it. This seems like a pretty big design flaw.

I added the UseXVidMode key directly to .wine/user.reg with "vi", and it solved the problem. I didn't have a "Software\\Wine\\X11 Driver" section, so I had to add it. Good old vi.

     [Software\\Wine\\X11 Driver] 1220907868
       "UseXVidMode"="N"
The weird thing is that I have since deleted this setting from the registry and it seems that wine is still working. So there's probably a cache somewhere. Whatever. Anyway, maybe you are having the same problem, and maybe you can use this information.


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