Windows Extraction with Singularity

Today one of my colleagues hit an infinite loop when a support technician required the extraction of (Linux) drivers from an .exe file. The conservation went something like this, and I have a feeling many administrators have “been here.”

But I don’t have Windows…

and the response?

Just run the .exe

Awkward silence

…

Face palms ensued. He was able to do it with other means (I’m sure this isn’t a new request), but because I was curious, I wanted to give a go at using a Singularity container to do it. And I had the perfect container in mind.

Windows in Linux

A long while back, one of our users created an awesome container, Dolmades that I featured on the Singularity site that would drumroll let you play a Windows game via wine on a Linux machine via a Singularity container. I thought this was a long shot, and I knew I would still have to endure a gazillion dialog boxes of doom, but here is how I was able to extract a (dummy) .exe archive.

Pull the container

Let’s first pull the container from Singularity Hub!

$ singularity pull shub://katakombi/dolmades
Progress |===================================| 100.0% 
Done. Container is at: /home/vanessa/katakombi-dolmades-master-latest.simg

And now shell inside

$ singularity shell katakombi-dolmades-master-latest.simg 
Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Do we have wine?

Singularity katakombi-dolmades-master-latest.simg:~> which wine
/usr/bin/wine

Here I’m downloading an example file. I have no idea what it is, it’s a random Dell driver I found that thappens to have an .exe that is meant to extract (and then install).

$ wget https://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER00331497M/2/VideoOPGA6_XP_A00_setup-R3M7Y_ZPE.exe

Make a directory to dump stuff

$ mkdir -p /tmp/stuff

Run wine.

$ wine VideoOPGA6_XP_A00_setup

With this command you are going to get a TON of prompts that wine can’t find a dependency, and needs to install it. Just click install. Be patient. Be brave. You’ll get through it! There might also be some more prompts with “Continue” and “OK” and “Would you like pancakes with that?” I’m so sorry in advance for all those prompts, it’s not my fault. When you get to the screen to where to extract the files, typo in /tmp/stuff, and then extract! After extraction, the install executable (GUI) will start to run, just exit it. You can then peep into /tmp/stuff and… see all the stuff!

$ ls /tmp/stuff/
Bin  Bin64  Config  Images  MUP.xml  Packages  Setup.exe  mfc100u.dll  msvcp100.dll  msvcr100.dll

There you go! No need for Windows! And we have… the stuff :) As a pro tip, you can name the folder to be how you feel about the software at the moment. I chose to call it stuff, although you may have other sentiments :)

What other Windows things can we do with Dolmades? If you do something cool, please share!

Sochat, Vanessa. "Windows Extraction with Singularity." @vsoch (blog), 29 Jun 2018, https://vsoch.github.io/2018/singularity-extract/ (accessed 16 Apr 24).