[Wine] Why can't one run Wine apps in Windows

[Charles Davis]

On 10/16/10 11:36 PM, adav84 wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> from mere curiosity, I copied my .wine folder to Windows and tried running the *.exe files therein (such as notepad.exe, clock.exe etc), but absolutely nothing seems to happen.
> Is this normal?
Yes. They're not real executable files. They're stubs that are put there
to fool stupid Windows programs that expect them to be there. They have
resources (particularly the version resource), but that's about it.
> Also, is the reason Wine programs don't run in Windows a legal or a technical one?
Technical.
> And, in the latter case, could you provide some detailed info on why this is so?
The real executables are located in <prefix>/lib/wine. (<prefix> is set
at installation time. Most Linux distros set the <prefix> to /usr. When
you install from source, it's set to /usr/local. It could be any valid
directory though; /opt/local, or /sw, for example.) They're in the
executable format of your native OS (ELF, or if you run Mac OS X,
Mach-O), which is different from Windows' (PE). Windows doesn't
understand executables that aren't in PE format, so you can't run Wine's
built-in executables on Windows. In fact, Winelib executables (as
they're called) are actually shared objects. This is so they can be
loaded by the 'wine' executable. So they're actually useless without the
'wine' executable even if Windows could run them.

Chip