virtual memory exhausted while using wine

Question

I have two machines - a laptop and a desktop, both running Pangolin. Wine works fine on laptop, but it doesn't work at all on my desktop. It was working until a couple of days ago, but has stopped working since then. Every time I try to run wine, I get "virtual memory exhausted" error.

I googled around a bit, and came across two suggestions:

• removing ".wine" directory from home.
• adding the current user to "audio" group.

I tried both, but neither fixes the problem for me. Please help.

Answer 1

Since Wine is talking about a VM, a quick solution is to turn off the swap and back on to empty the swap partition.

sudo swapoff -a
sudo swapon -a

This is more likely the result of too much RAM being used and not enough swap on the HDD.

Answer 2

Upgarding wine fixed the problem.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine