[Wine] How to use apps and DLLs from XP partition?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 07 February 2007, David Gerard wrote:
> I have a Dell Latitude D600 with Windows XPsp2 on the first partition
> and Ubuntu Feisty (Linux kernel 2.6.20) with Wine 0.9.30 on the
> second partition, set up to dual-boot. The XP share is NTFS and
> mounted read-only for Linux.
>
> What I want to do is run my Windows apps from the XP partition under
> Wine, because I really hate using Windows.
>
> A lot of the apps seem to ask for DLLs they can't find. Is there any
> way to point Wine at the DLLs on the XP share? Genuine Microsoft
> Windows XPsp2 DLLs, all legal, all lovely.
>
> Is anyone else doing something like this successfully?

The risk would be enormous. DO NOT EVEN TRY IT.

Reasons:

Unless you have ntfs3g installed, you do not have write access to that 
XP partition.
Windows apps (even running under wine) usually require write access to 
most of the disk. And they don't have it.
When (not if) wine corrupts that ntfs partition, or the ntfs driver in 
the kernel does it, then you lose a working Windows install.

Rathe do what the wine devs recommend you do, which is to let wine 
create it's own ~/.wine, then you (being a beta software user) get to 
help the community figure out how to make stuff work.

Quite a while ago I managed to get wine working on an original MS 
install. I installed Windows on a vfat partition, and told wine to use 
that as my drive_c. I *think* (but could be mistaken) it was XP, and it 
worked rather well as a lot of missing dll issues went away. The key 
thing is that I never booted into that install to use it as windows for 
real, so there was no risk to me should wine ever trash it.

hth,

alan

-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five