Make a link to a wine application
 

I installed MSN Messenger using wine under the root account.
i can not access the root folder from the main user account that i want to run messenger from.
So i have to "su" in a terminal to become root, then navigate to /root/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/MSN Messenger
and from there "wine msnmsgr.exe" to launch the program.

I just need an icon in my user desktop that can take care of all this..

Thanks

You should install the Windows application under your /home directory, and execute it from there. Wine is not supposed to be run as root, since it gives the Windows application full access to the file system.

If installed properly by the user, an icon for the installed program should come up in your GNOME/KDE desktop.

Is this a question on what format the path should take? If so then the path should look something like this:

/root/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/MSN\ Messenger.

Notice the backslashes in the path; it seems that Linux doesn't parse the spaces in filenames in a manner you'd expect, so using those backslashes helps with that issue. If you were to type the path as "/root/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/MSN Messenger", this is what Linux sees:

/root/.wine/drive_c/Program

...and you'll probably get an error like, "Can't find file '/root/.wine/drive_c/Program'". Using the backslashes should help.

Have you looked into using something like wine-tools (? if maintained) or wine-doors to setup WINE in your own home directory?

And I second the motion about never running WINE as root.

I disagree; yes, you don't want to run your apps as root, but you can choose to install them where ever (provided you have write access to the chosen dir). For example, I run Half-Life 2 (Steam) out of a dir in my data partition which is mounted up as /data. If you wanted to, you could install the app as root and run it as yourself to put it in /usr/share with other Linuxy apps.

In my config, Z:\ is "/" so I just put the app in z: somewhere e.g.

Z:\data\Steam

or

Z:\usr\share\Steam

That will allow the app to be used by other users which it would seem is your goal. Otherwise ~/.wine is a great place if only you will be running the app.

Hope that helps,
-Corr

Use visudo and add a line like this : "%users ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL"
-This will ad you to the sudo list, and allow you to use root commands as user.-

Place "sudo wine /root/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/MSN Messenger/msnmsgr.exe" in your link.

I have started IE6 on root as user using this method ...

(GAIM works very well, so why don't you use this program as messenger ?)

As already covered, you are not supposed to run Wine as root for any reason. Running it through sudo is even worse.

Of course, not running software as root is a core concept in basic Linux use, so this shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.