Thus far in using Ubuntu, I’ve been able to use only Linux applications. I’ll admit that some of them were just ports of their Windows or Mac OS X counterparts…but I never had to install wine (a compatibility layer for running Windows programs). Well you know that torrent app I recommended? kTorrent? It’s crashed on me several times in the last couple days…and ate up every bit of memory the system had this morning. I went looking for a better alternative and my only choice was to use uTorrent under wine. No problem!

Wine is only a synaptic click away. Running utorrent under it is a simple affair too. I found this tutorial very helpful: Using utorrent with wine - Ubuntu Forums

However, since my primary monitor is a 32" LCD and I’m at about an 8-10 foot distance from it - the font size needs to be increased. Under windows this is a simple task…but under Wine = not so much. I think this is something that NEEDS to be put into the wine configuration app. Anyway - here’s how it’s done.

First - close any applications that are running under wine.

To change the size of any menu font - you’ll need to edit the win.ini under the following folder: /home/yourusername/.wine/

Add the following information to the win.ini file:

[Desktop]
MenuFontSize=18

You can change the 18 to whatever size you need - but that worked for me. Now we need to change font size of the rest of the application. To do so, use the terminal and launch wine’s regedit:

wine regedit

You’ll want to browse to this value:

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Fonts\LogPixels

and change it to something larger. Make sure to change the selection to “Decimal”, as you probably don’t natively speak hex. It’s default in decimal is 96. I upped mine to 120 and it worked nicely. When you’re done doing that, close out regedit and restart your wine application. Enjoy your larger font sizes and lack of squinting!

Here’s the best resource I found on this matter after a bit of searching: http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-users/2005-April/017810.html