[Wine] Re: multiple users on LINUX - way to share a single .wine

[Craig73]

nanonyme wrote:
> Theoretically speaking: (do not consider this a guide)
> If I were to emulate what Windows works like, I'd probably have:
> a) One user who owns the global wineprefix and everything inside it is only writable by this user (except userdir inside the "documents and settings" equivalent) (Here be administrator)
> b) Each other user has their own wineprefixes (owner the other user, possibly created by some setuid script) which have dosdevices and drive_c mount binded to ones in global wineprefix folders and system.reg hardlinked to the global system.reg. Users would have their own user.reg and userdef.reg.
> c) Some means of making sure only one user at a time can start Wine as the user who owns wineprefix. Program installation would usually require changing uid to that other user and running program installer.
> If registry files are separated so that system.reg contains *only* global keys that users aren't supposed to modify, it might work. Quite a lot of work though, you'd probably get by easier by just buying a Windows.
> Still note this is highly speculative and theoretical and probably will not work as is. :)
> (Someone could fork a project for that kind of stuff though if they happen to have enough scientific curiosity)


OK, so to get some clarification, I have a few questions
a) I assume that multiple prefixes can be run in Wine because it is popular to install apps into seperate wineprefixes to isolate them... so I assume I can run these two apps at the same time with no risk of corruption?  [Is this correct?]

b) So if I've copied my .wine folder to some shared read-only location, then symlinked to my local .folder all the read-only shared stuff, and the files that need to be modified (specifically profile/username, user.reg,  and perhaps temp) are located in my local .wine folder, then why would I expect any corruption?    [Note: I was wondering if MSOCache, DLLCache, Spool need to be local and user modifiable as well.  I'm not sure why the userdef.reg the default user needs to be user modifiable.]  

c) If option b) does work, what precludes having an option on install that asks you to enter your Wine Administrator password and automatically installing to the shared .wine folder.  [run .wine under the "Windows" userid, where it's WINEPREFIX is the /usr/share/.wine folder.]