Probs with wine/DirectX

[MindTrip]

So I got wine working.... sort of.  I was never able to run 'wineinstall'
b/c if i try to run it under my ordinary login, it halts at 'config' and
says I don't have permission, but if I log in as root, I can change
directories to the /usr/src/wine/tools and I can see 'wineinstall' and
'config' as executable files (I even chmod a+x them to be sure) but when at:

root# wineinstall (or config)
it replies
bash: command or file not found

But I can run things like sol.exe and other non-directX programs through
wine, although they may be buggy.  But when trying to run halflife, or any
other directX program for that matter, I get the window
______________________________
| Half-Life requires DirectX 6.0 or later  |
|  <OK>             <Cancel>                         |
|_____________________________|

just as if I were running it in Win95/98 without DirectX installed.  But
I've looked through every faq and how-to I can find, and no one mentions
this kind of problem.

Is this a wine configuration problem?  I do get  a message in the terminal
window (as it's running wine):  You need to install WinMM (etc)   But how
can I run wineinstall when I don't have the proper permissions in a regular
session, and the root session doesn't seem to recognize 'wineinstall' as a
valid executable??

TIA
mindtrip at swbell.net