Updated: May 7, 2025
About two years ago, I wrote an article showing you how to install and use SketchUp Make 2017 in Linux. This awesome little tutorial is part of my migration away from Windows. The idea is to use one of the many available distributions as my baseline operating system, use native programs as much as possible, and if not, then also use Windows software through WINE. SketchUp Make is a good example. Furthermore, I expanded this topic some more with a second guide on how to fix blank menus in the likes of Maxwell Render plugin. Superb. Later on, I aggregated both these tutorials into a single large article, which covers all of these fine details. Noice.
For a few months, everything was peachy. Then, all of a sudden, SketchUp stopped working. It would no longer run. As always, when you hit an issue of this kind, you need to repeat the execution from the command line, to see exactly what kind of errors crop up. For me, the exception was: wine: Call from 00006FFFFFC84108 to unimplemented function iertutil.dll.653, aborting. Well, let's fix this.
Solution
My guess is that one of the WINE updates ever so slightly "broke" the compatibility list for whatever DLLs SketchUp uses. Luckily, having already done quite a bit of work on adding library overrides as part of my work on the Maxwell Render plugin, I immediately thought about adding yet another exception. The command-line error gives enough information - iertutil.dll. All right.
Launch winecfg (for whatever prefix you use for SketchUp), click on the Libraries tab. In the field labeled New override for library:, either type the full name of the "offending" DLL, or search for it in the list, and add it as iertutil (native, builtin). Apply, close winecfg. Relaunch SketchUp Make, and enjoy the program!
Conclusion
I don't know whether this wee issue is the result of various IE8 libraries I had to use to get the Maxwell Render plugin to work correctly (the blank menus), or if this is simply due to the version upgrade in WINE. Whatever the reason, the fix is relatively simple. We need to override the library use, as we've already done a handful of times. And that's it.
Of course, I'm not happy when regressions happen. Moreover, this sort of problem does somewhat erode one's confidence, as my expectation is that the various WINE programs will keep on running without any issues. I'm not really looking forward to any sort of constant maintenance, nor is that a sustainable usage model. But so far, in the past three years, I've only encountered one or two major bugs with SketchUp in Linux, and I was able to solve them relatively quickly. Along the way, I also figured how to fix some really big, arcane issues, making my overall compatibility and fun posture that much better. So yeah. Enough for today. Hopefully, this will have been useful. Take care, Tuxians.
Cheers.