Question about ~/.wine/dosdevices/

[Michael Druing]

Hi,

> Hmm, you are the third to answer me, but none so far have answered my 
> questions.
> 
> >>>
> Are files first looked up in dosdevices/c: and the in 
> /mnt/windows/ if 
> not found? 
> 
> The reason I ask is that icewind dale on /mnt/windows/ does a 
> FindFirstFileA("C:/program...") which wine translates to 
> dosdevice/c: and 
> ofcause does not find anything. Am I suppose to make a link 
> to where the 
> program is installed, as if I had installed it with wine? 
> <<<

Wine uses a subdirectory under your home directory as its "C:\" drive. So if
you install Icewind Dale (or anything else) under wine, it will copy its
files to "~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/...". When you start the
program and it does the FindFirstA("C:\Program Files\..."), wine correctly
translates that back to "~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/..." for you,
so everything is fine.

If you don't want to install the game in wine but rather use an existing
Windows installation you should either copy and/or link to your existing
installation, but bear in mind that this might - as others have already
pointed out - break your installation on windows for some reason or another
and is generally not suggested.

> 
> So I will try and refraise the questions:
> 
> How does wine differentiate whether I have installed a program under 
> ~/.wine/drive_c/ or under /mnt/windows/, when it does a 
> FindFirstFileA("c:/Program Files/")? In the first case it 
> should translate 
> it to ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/ and in the latter 
> ~/.wine/dosdevices/z:/mnt/windows/Program Files/?

Wine cannot guess where your existing windows partition is mounted.

> 
> If I have a program that does this, should I then make a link from 
> ~/.wine/drice_c/Program Files/foo to /mnt/windows/Program 
> Files/foo? (This 
> will work with this program, but I have newer read such 
> recommendation).

This is one solution if you don't want to install the game under wine. It
should work for everything that doesn't change the registry or install
system-wide DLLs. Icewind Dale (and pretty much all other Infinity Engine
based games) should work with that kludge.

--Michael

P.S.: If you're a developer, you could check out the gemrb project at
Sourceforge, which tries to create an open-source crossplatform Infinity
Engine implementation, which one day will run Icewind Dale (and other games)
natively on Linux ;-)