I have been having a major uphill battle as of late with trying to get RMS Express installed on my Linux machines. As of yesterday, I think I have it figured out now!
In doing some deep searching, I found this GitHub link, courtesy of WheezyE. The package is called Winelink, so called because it installs Wine, the Wine dependencies, VARA, RMS Express, and anything else to run the software. Originally, it was written for the Raspberry Pi 4 system, but in recent developments, it can run on most x64 Linux distros including Mint. The developer eventually wants to make future implementations so that it is available for every and all Linux and MacOS distros, which would finally enable some form of cross-platforming for doing Winlink operations. Thank you a million WheezyE - you've just made my life ten times easier (and probably other new hams using Linux too)!
I did have to manually install the RMS Express exe file, but I'll take that over having to spend countless hours of trial-and-error. Plus, after you install this via the curl command, you should be able to download any Windows software and run it on your non-Windows machine! How nice is that???
I can't tell you how many virtual machines I've had to burn through just to get this one to work. However, I did run across some problems along the way, but I think I may have figured out how to overcome them.
1. VARA/RMS (or even Wine) crashes while updating path and propagation tables via the internet
It's a matter of simply reinstalling the software by copying and pasting the curl command from WheezyE's GitHub page. Once you do this, it should work just fine. Make sure also you have a stable internet connection, especially one that's free from restrictions such as a school internet system. I installed this package while I was at school and when I got home, it didn't work. Oops!
2. Audio keeps cutting in and out
Make sure you have the right audio configuration set up in Wine. This is especially important since Wine is used to emulate the software. Incorrect audio configuration can lead to distorted audio, glitchy output, etc. Also, try using the headphone port - it seems to work better than computer speakers. I think it's because I'm testing this on an emulator (Wine) inside of a VM (VirtualBox): in essence, a VM inside of a VM. I think it will run much better on the machine itself, that way it won't have to go through 2 compatibility layers.
3. I can't open RMS Express from the Winlink icon itself
This is a little confusing since it does take you into a directory folder set up by the .sh file. You may have to download and install the exe separately from Winlink.org if you can't specifically find RMS Express in any of the subfolders. I did this and it worked just fine. Make sure you open it with the Wine Windows installer. From there, you should be able to run it normally and make a desktop launcher icon.
Anyways, that's all for now! Stay tuned for more info as I continue to debug and experiment with it.
I also want to give a bit of an update on my CW adventure...
Morse Code is starting to become a second language to me. I can individualize letters so now I just need to work on grouping them and getting up to 15-20wpm. At this rate, I could carry on a QSO, but it'd be QRSS! But everyone has to start somewhere...
UPDATE (10-13): It seems that Winlink still crashes for me!!! But that's okay. I reached out to the creator of the .sh file and he said that wine-mono can't handle exceptions like a normal Windows system can. There is an error in the RMS Channels.dat file where frequencies that are supposed to be entered in Hertz are actually entered in KHz, for example, 7100000Hz (7.100MHz) is incorrectly entered as 7100. Windows can handle this but wine cannot. Editing the dat file should help but unfortunately Winlink keeps updating via the internet, so I think it's something on Winlink's side of things.
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