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

[Rico Schüller]

Am 17.10.2010 07:56, schrieb 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
>    
If you like to run the programs on windows, you could build the programs 
with mingw.

See http://wiki.winehq.org/CompilingDLLsUsingMingw for references. You 
could build the programs the same way as the dlls.