[Wine] Re: [FAQ] [RFC] How can multiple users share an installed Wine a

[fcmartins]

oiaohm wrote:
> fcmartins way does work.  But we don't go around recommending due to a few issues.
> ...
> 
> Really without addressing the wineserver issue we are really playing with fire every way is a hack and shows it.
> 

yes, thanks for listing these. Further, my "solution" is not suitable to CLI averse people.


Paul Menzel wrote:
> 
> How does the second user get the program installed, that means
> get this application registered as installed? How do you handle the file
> permissions?
> 

I just copy the .wine folder per application, per user. What I do is keep a /home/user/WinePrefixes folder per user. After install and tweaking I do
mv .wine to admin/WinePrefixes/appname
then hand-edit .desktop file to open from the renamed prefix. Then, for each user (not tested, from the top of my head),
su user
cd
cp -r /home/admin/WinePrefixes/appname WinePrefixes
cp /home/admin/Desktop/appname.desktop Desktop

hand-edit appname.desktop so that it reflects the users WinePrefix.

As for permissions, if the application uses MyDocuments (which recent games do), each user's Documents folder is used transparently. Otherwise, if needed I do 

sudo chmod -R 775 /path-to-app/appname

assuming all users are in the same group. I vaguely remember a case where I had to do 777 and another in which it didn't work at all because a file was always be recreated with 700 or something like that. Not perfect, in practice works for most of the apps.

For the record, I think my "solution" requires more work than the one on ubuntu's. I have 4 users sharing two computers, and /home is network-shared. So this solution is suitable for my setup. It is certainly not recommendable in general.