Background:
I am making a bootable usb for a friend in a highly censored area. The distro needs to be compatible with older computers, safe, and light. Hence I started trying out different puppy linux distros a month ago. Now after a lot of the problems I was able to (clumsily) figure out eventually, I am constantly having trouble with either WINE or this particular software - freegate8.00p (fg800p.exe). I am aware I can use tor browser but this is one of the proxy server softwares tested to pretty reliably run in their area so it will be great if I could get it to work.
What I already tried:
I tried different puppy distros (both 64 and 32 bit) and different WINE versions (from .pet, build from winehq, from debian source, AppImage, conty.sh, and wine-portables)(yes I pretty much read all the WINE posts from this forum and tried all the fixes people suggested). None has worked so far with fg. I also tried different combination of WINE and fg on other full linux distros that (is said to) resemble some puppys, and I was able to get them to work on Ubuntu20.04 (but not fossapup64), Debian12 (but not bookwormpup32), and Debian 11 (but not vanilladpup32). I understand that it might be normal that some things will run in a full linux distro but not its puppy counterpart (?). Is it a library problem? I can't just copy over those files from other linux distros to do a patch work (that sounds desperate but I am), correct?
Current situation:
After "fixing" a lot of the complaints from WINE, I learned that a 32-bit distro gives the least amount of complaints, and it's easier for me to (not) handle dependencies with apt install than say pkg from fossapup (and I don't have to worry about the 32-bit compatibility). So right now I am focused on vanilladpup32-9.3. I was able to install WINE, which tested to work with firefox.exe.
Problem:
Now when I tried to wine freegate800p.exe, the welcome/user terms page opened up fine, but no response after that. Normally there will be a window to ask you if you want to choose some blacklist/whitelist or use proxy for all websites, then the main page that shows it's trying to connect to a server. While there was no response, when I ps -e I could see fg running. I tried to just set the browser to connect to the internet via the proxy port, but I will get "the proxy server is refusing connection", which basically means it's not working. There is also not any message in the terminal, no fixme, no errors.
Any suggestions will be much appreciated. If you don't mind testing it feel free to google and download it (cuz attaching a .exe is probably a little sketchy... and apparently not allowed). This is where I downloaded my copy: https://freegate-release.github.io/website/
And I am happy to try other puppy distro as long as I can get fg to work. Thank you!