[Wine] Re: Old Wine, New Wine, and ??

[SpawnHappyJake]

Hi David! Running Windows programs from the "Windows side" via Wine is frowned upon and can break things. Sure, ever since NTFS there's the issue with not having full support for that filesystem in Linux or Mac, but there's the big issue of programs not syncing back to Windows's registry because they (nowadays) only read and write to Wine's registry. In fact, they don't even see the windows side as the C drive, so a lot of things can break.

I didn't know that once upon a time Wine could use the real Windows registry. That's interesting.

Well, you can try importing registry keys over. The Wine registry editor accepts *.reg files. And you can make multiple prefixes at will, so you can at any time create a fresh prefix for experimentation, and delete the prefix if something doesn't work.

There's lots of tools that can help you. From your Windows side, you can run the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder to extract a lot of keys that you can use to reinstall your programs on your non-Windows+Wine side. The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder can not yet load a hive (binary registry file) from within Wine.

I do know that you can view your Windows registry from Wine using the MiTeC registry viewer (at least last time I tried it worked). It might even be able to extract *.reg files for you from your Windows registry which you can then import into an experimental prefix's registry using Wine's registry editor.

If that fails, you can boot back and forth as you extract stuff to *.reg files with Window's registry editor.

If you really wanted to be adventurous, you could try importing your entire Windows registry into an experimental Wine prefix, and then copy files from your Windows side into the prefix, but that sounds bound to break something.

You can also use virtual machines to get a fresh installation of Windows, then using WhatChanged and RegShot, you can take snapshots before and after installing programs and activating programs. Then you specifically know what to copy over to Wine. 

Cheers,
Jake