[Wine] Starting WINE

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 18 March 2008, sgtbob wrote:
> I tried your suggestion and met with varying results - but still
> reading and trying.
>
> I have two identical 160 GB HDD's - one with Windows installed and
> one with Ubuntu installed. Can you tell me if the .exe has to reside
> on the windows drive or on the Ubuntu drive?  I have met with limited
> results in trying to do a wine Legacy6Setup.exe from the terminal -
> basically says not available...
>
> I 'think' I was able to install the Legacy program by putting it on
> my Ubuntu desktop, but when I tried to run it, I encountered an
> 'error 545 ' or some such number. I have been able to access the 'C:'
> drive, which I presume is on the Windows HDD, but when I try to open
> a file from Legacy (eg. Bob.fdb - which is my genealogy file), the
> only .fdb seen is one that is a sample.fdb that came with the
> program, which will not load, even though I can see teh fiel I want
> if I go to Windows.
>
> Maybe I'm expecting too much from Wine with my limited knowledge of
> Linux. What I had hoped to do was to use my Ubuntu to work with files
> and programs installed on my Windows HDD with the Ubuntu Wine
> package. Am I misinterpreting what it should/would do?

No, this tactic will never ever work. OK, maybe it will sometimes but it 
takes a pro. There are two reasons:

- Linux cannot write to your NTFS partition in safety and any Windows 
app running in wine would of course need to do that. You could use a 
driver called ntfs-ng instead of the one that comes with the kernel 
itself but frankly, I don't trust either.

- Wine cannot read the native windows registry, it needs it's own 
registry format which it reads off a Linux file and once it's in memory 
presents the registry to apps the way they expect it.

The only sane way to run windows apps is to let Wine create it's own 
Windows-like setup on a Linux disk, and then install the app into Wine. 
Unfortunately this means you will usually have two installs for a 
windows app - one in wine and one in windows itself and they should 
stay very very separate.

It's important to keep in mind what Wine really is - it's a Linux 
application that does all the stuff Windows does when windows apps want 
to run. When the windows app starts, it expects to see a system that 
behaves like windows does, and Wine performs this. Under the covers 
it's listening to what the windows apps wants to do and actually doing 
the corresponding Linux thing. It's quite an awesome trick actually :-) 
But wine and windows just don't mix in the same space.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com