Before bothering the wine folks thought I'd ask here...

On my fully-updated (fully operational battle station), er, centos box I seem to be able to use the Centos-released version of wine to run the software installers for quite a few apps. However, at no time during the installer do I actually see any text in any of the dialogs that appear. This makes it a little hard to choose options :)

Does anyone here have any experience using wine like this and perhaps can tell me what I need to do to fix it?

for years I've had one of the huge sets of national geographic on CDROM, and years ago it wouldn't even install on wine. I've just used acroread to view the files in the past, but thought I'd see today if the wine i've got will install it. Yes, it seems to, but it's hard to tell what choices I made. For example, it wont' actually run (now that it is installed) unless I register it, which apparently is done as part of the installation. Before I go run the installer again and see if I can fake my way through registration I'd like to see if there's a way to tweak Wine so it'll let me see the text in the installer windows (and the legends on the buttons).

Thanks!