[Wine]Navigating to the upper floor of the /Home directory using Wine.

[Holly Bostick]

Robert Yu schreef:
> Hello, Anne...

Who's Anne? (Hi, Anne, whoever you are :-) )

> 
> "That's how it works-- Windows programs now consider your /home folder to
> be the D:\ drive, because that's what your symlink told Wine to tell the
> Windows programs (that d: is a symbol representing ~/ to Linux and D:\
> to Windows)"
> 
> Can you make Symlick names other than lone alphabets? Can I call my
> Resumes/reference/letters folder that's inside the home partition
> "employ"?

Not for Wine purposes, because Windows (and programs that run under
Windows) does not understand any drive letters other than the 'lone
alphabet' you refer to. So any symlinks that you make for Wine to use in
the ~/.wine/dosdevices folder must be named a 'lone alphabet' letter.

But symlinks you make within the Linux file system for your own purposes
can be called anything that you want. Helps to keep it short and simple,
obviously.

However, you should be aware that if you want the files behind your
'employ' symlink to be accessible to Wine programs (let's say you want
to edit your CV in Word), you will need to change one line in the Wine
configuration file (normally found at ~/.wine/config), because Wine
normally cannot follow symlinks.

In this section of the configuration file

[wine]
"Windows" = "c:\\windows"
"GraphicsDriver" = "x11drv"
;"ShowDirSymlinks" = "1"
;"ShowDotFiles" = "1"

the line

;"ShowDirSymlinks" = "1"

must be uncommented (the ";" removed from in front of it-- this symbol
turns the line into a "comment", meaning the setting is ignored), so
that it looks like this:

"ShowDirSymlinks" = "1"

(don't forget to save the edited file) and then Wine will follow
symlinks. This is not the default behaviour because Windows doesn't know
squat about symlinks, so you have to make a "special request"
(reconfigure Wine) to allow them to be seen.

Once you've done that, if you then go to drive D:\ in the Word Open
dialog-- D:\ being your home directory, set in /dosdevices-- and click
on the "employ" symlink that you created, the dialog will show you the
files in /wherever/the/symlink/really/points/to.

You should also be aware that Wine no longer creates a configuration
file by default (dependent on Wine version, but I'm currently using
20050115, and I don't have one) so you may not find a file at
~/.wine/config. However, there is an example file *somewhere*-- the Wine
documentation says it's located in the documentation/samples/ folder of
the source tarball, but if you installed Wine from a binary for your
distribution, it could be most anywhere. I found my sample config
installed to /usr/share/wine under Gentoo, by using the

locate wine/config

command. When you find the sample config, it can be copied to your
~/.wine folder to be used as the normal configuration file.

Or you can use WineTools, but I have never used it and don't know the
scope of its configuration options.

> 
> And to my ultimate question: considering the following scenario: if I
> want to run something that's in /usr or /bin whatever stores
> NON-Windows programs, will making a Symlink help?

This is of course not related to Wine (since Wine has nothing to do with
non-Windows programs) but is a general Linux question. However, the
answer is no, you don't need to.

/usr/bin and /bin (among other common folders that normally contain
application executables) are in your PATH: the places that the OS
automatically looks for applications. Most Linux applications install
their executable to a location in the PATH. So all you have to do is
type the executable name and the application will start. For example,
the executable for Mozilla Firefox is located in /usr/bin, but when I
want to call that application from a terminal, or create a desktop icon
for it, all I have to type is 'firefox'-- because the OS will
automatically look in /usr/bin for an executable binary named firefox
(and find it). If it didn't find it there, it would look in certain
specific other locations (listed in the $PATH variable). If it still did
not find it, you would get an error, which you could solve by either
giving the full path to the executable (for example,
/opt/Firefox/bin/firefox; just a made-up example of a path that's not
likely in the $PATH statement), or add the path to your $PATH statement,
which is beyond the scope of this email but documented on the Internet,
and probably in the Mandriva documentation.

Hope this helps,
Holly