PokerTracker Linux Tutorial

This tutorial describes how to setup PokerTracker in wine. I used Ubuntu 7.04, but the process should be very similar for most distributions.

I will assume you already have a working Linux PostgreSQL installation.

Here is how to get PokerTracker working:

1. Make a backup of your current .wine directory.
2. Create a fresh wine-installation using ies4linux (select to install IE6 only).
3. After the ies4linux script is finished, copy/move '~/.ies4linux/ie6' to '~/.wine'.
4. Set Windows Version to Win98 in winecfg.
5. Install DCOM98, MDAC 2.8, Jet 4.0 SP8 (English versions.)
   Downloads available for free at MS.
   
6. Install Windows PostgreSQL ODBC driver
7. Install PokerTracker
8. Add library overrides for PokerTracker. Run these 2 commands in your shell:
   
   

   wget http://www.holdemresources.net/hr/linuxpoker/pokertracker/ptrack-reg.txt regedit ptrack-reg.txt

   
   

   Note for advanced users: I simply override like 50 libs to "native,builtin". When testing with builtin libs + overrides for the odbc-libs to native/builtin, i had some strange bugs and then switched everything to native/builtin. Setting some of those libs back to builtin/native may slightly increase performance, but you will need to do a lot of testing to find out which builtin libs cause problems. If you are not experienced with wine, just run the 2 commands above and don't bother to change anything else manually.

   
   
9. If you have a non-US locale, make sure you change it to US before running PokerTracker. If you are working on an English system you can skip this step. (PokerTracker will ask you if it should override the locale to US, but this does not work in wine. You have to change the locale yourself. )
   
   Changing the desktop starter to:
   
   

   env LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US:en" WINEPREFIX="/home/xxxxx/.wine" wine "C:\xxxxx\Poker Tracker V2\ptrack2.exe"

   
   did the job for me.
   
   

You are now ready to start PokerTracker. I have my PostgreSQL running on Linux and connecting PokerTracker to it with the windows native ODBC driver. Everything essential works fine.

What doesn't work:

• Auto-requesting tournament summaries and POP3-mail fetching does not work. You have to manually request your summary, save the mail to a text file and then import it.
• Performance is generally "ok", but significantly worse than in Windows. I suspect this is because we use the windows native ODBC driver. Wine can bridge to UnixODBC, and performance should be much better that way when using PostgreSQL databases. Sadly, PokerTracker stores its registration data in a MS Access database, and will refuse to run with the UnixODBC bridge.