[Wine] Re: Using Wine with Windows data

[vitamin]

[quote="Usurp"]
Alistair wrote:
> Hi I am new to Wine, but I read in the FAQ the following:
> 'Do not try to configure Wine to point to your actual Windows C:\ drive. We have tried to make this hard to do so you probably cannot do it by accident.'
> 
> This does not make sense to me since my primary use would be to run programs under Wine eg Quicken which point to a data file in Windows so that both Windows and Linux access the same data. This is what I thought the settings in Wine were for so that you could define desired directories in your Windows partition to use that data.


There are several reasons why you shouldn't never try pointing Wine's c: drive to real windows' c: drive:
- Wine will destroy windows installation by corrupting some key system files. After that windows won't boot
- Wine is made to work with it's own dlls, data files, directory layout, permissions, etc. You will "kill" Wine if you try to copy all windows dlls from system32 into Wine's system32.
- Wine can't read windows binary registry files.
- Windows uses NTFS partition that still does not provide 100% required functionality for some programs (fixed in kernel 2.6.26+ only).

All this means - you have to treat Wine like a totally separate PC. And you have to install all the programs on Wine before you can use them
You could map the windows drive in winecfg for easy access. But I'd strongly suggest making a copy of all the data files to use with Wine. In case files get corrupted.