[Wine]How to make C drive to point to /usr/share/wine-c

[Holly Bostick]

saravananv wrote:
> Because, using wine i ran a windows application setup & it is installing
> in wine's C drive.The application is for general use. If the C drive is
> common then all the users of a system can access it.

That is not necessarily true. Wine is a per-user app; every user has 
their own Wine Registry, with the list of installed apps for that user.

So one user installing App A is not going to tell the Wine Registry of 
any other user that App A is installed. The other user will have to 
install the application as well.

Now, the benefit of having the fake_windows drive in a central 
location-- *or of making a symlink in ~/.wine/dosdevices to a central 
location and calling it "d:", and then installing the programs there, 
rather than just accepting the default C:\Program Files*-- is that it 
saves disk space, because even though you may have to reinstall the 
programs, you're installing them to the same place (D:\), they don't 
take any additional space.

Per-user program settings probably get screwed, though, if that's a 
consideration. And furthermore, just because you move fake_windows to a 
common location does not mean that all users have access to the program 
installed there-- unless you have re-configured the default creation 
permissions mask, the owner of the installation process (user A) will 
own all files created by the installer (assuming that you are installing 
to a location where user A has write permissions), members of the User 
A's default group will have read, and possibly execute permissions, and 
'others' who are neither User A nor members of User A's default group 
will probably have only read permissions. Because of this, it's unlikely 
that the program will run for any other user other than User A, both 
because the program does not exist in the Wine Registry of these other 
users (and many programs require a Registry entry to run), and also 
because no other user has the correct permissions to manage the delicate 
interaction of the installed files to enable the program to run. For 
example, if User B does not have read/write permission to any *.ini 
files the program may have or create, the program may run, but User B 
won't be able to change any settings, which may crash the program, if it 
runs at all (many programs won't if the *.ini files are not writeable).

> Otherwise each user
> has to install the application to his own C drive. 

Add more drives. Now that you know how to do so, it's easy enough to 
designate a common folder as "D:\" or any other available drive letter; 
you are not forced to install anything to "C:\Program Files".

> 
> 	I have one option. Write a shell script to find dosdrives in a system &
> overwrite the  symlink to ./drive_c with a symlink to /usr/share/wine-c.

It seems to me that you'd also want to copy the Wine Registry to the 
other users' .wine directories, and hack permissions to enable all users 
(who are hopefully all members of a common group) to use the program, as 
well as installing shortcuts/panel links/desktop icons for each user 
involved (so you don't have to worry about them trying to start some 
additionally installed version of the program).

This is all doable, I think, but since you're basically talking about 
administrating multiple-user installs of a network program, you would 
need to be prepared to do some administration: point-and-click is 
generally for single-user installations; under both Windows and Linux.

Holly
> 
> Saravanan
> 
> On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 10:34, Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
>>On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 09:43:46 -0800, Saravanan <saravananv at erdcitvm.org> wrote:
>>
>>>But by this method, manually, I have to create symlink to "c" drive for each
>>>user. isn't it ?.  I want  it to be inbuild in wine so that, for any user by
>>>just typing the command wine, the sysmlink to /usr/share/wine-c should be
>>>automatically created.
>>>
>>>Saravanan
>>
>>But that's not the 'standard' that the Wine folks have decided on. In
>>the current implementation when you type wine --version, the .wine
>>directory is created and drive_c is created underneath, as is the link
>>to it. Everything is under .wine, which is simple.
>>
>>Why do you want it at /usr/share? And nothing stops you from doing
>>that. Jsut make the link in dosdevices as I showed earlier and it's
>>ready to go.
>>
>>- Mark
> 
> 
> 
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