[Wine] Question on preparing WINE

[L. Rahyen]

On Tuesday October 23 2007 08:01, Jeffrey Cobb wrote:
> I'm curious...
>
> Since we can no longer use winetools or sidenet to install Windows
> updates, components and other software (IE in particular) is there any
> other method for installing needed components including IE (other than
> IEs4Linux)?

	You may try to use some native dlls instead of builtin ones. But this may be 
difficult and tricky and even worse: it will mess up your wine prefix 
directory in weird ways. In other words: if you are going to install IE 
prepare to problems. To me it seems there is a lot of people who want to get 
IE to work but for some reason NONE of them is doing anything to make it work 
as it should (without native overrides).

> I suppose using IEs4Linux would be okay if I could incorporate it into
> my current wine configuration.  But it seems to create it's own
> implementation of wine that my apps can't use.

	IEs4Linux don't create its own implementation of WINE. It is supported by one 
person who did NOTHING to make WINE better. IEs4Linux is just a set of few 
shell scripts to automate installation process of IE and extreme amount of 
native DLLs. In fact IEs4Linux is one of the reasons why no one works to get 
IE to work out-of-the-box.

	If you don't want or cannot contribute to WINE (either by filling proper bug 
reports or by sending patches) to make it support IE better and still want to 
use IEs4Linux as an workaround then make sure to use it in its own WINE 
prefix directory (this is the defailt in IEs4Linux script). Then execute:

export WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6

	Now install all necessary programs which require IE as usually (if something 
fails with IEs4Linux but works with clean WINE prefix directory it is very 
unlikely to get any help from someone, sorry; you need to fill bug reports 
only against bugs which can be reproduced with clean WINE). They will be 
installed in WINE prefix directory with IE. In order to run program you have 
installed you need to cd to its installation directory and then run it like 
this:

wine program.exe

	Just make sure that you have correct WINEPREFIX variable in your environment 
when you run Windows program with WINE.
	In practice, I prefer to use wrapper script (so current directory doesn't 
matter) and run Windows programs natively (for example: ./program.exe) with 
Linux kernel feature to execute MISC binaries (let me know if you need help 
to get it work).