I have installed wine about 3 times both throw tar balls and rpm and i still can't get it configured properly or to install or run programs installed on the windows patition of my hard disk ..and dose anyone know of a way in which i can write to my windows partition bearing in mind its in NTFS format i am using linux mandrake distro 9.2 and i have a machine thats got hyper threading technology

I am afraid that running your windows applications of your NTFS windows partition will just not work. The windows applications add too many things to the registry which wine's virtual registry is missing out on, that will keep a lot of things from working right there. Also, there is only very dangerous write-support to NTFS, so it is really just read only. For all the applications you want to use with wine, you will have to install them again under wine, so that all the correct DLLs, registry entries, and more are in place.

"i still can't get it configured properly"
elaborate...
Did you run winesetup? Which distro of wine are you using?

NTFS is going to pose a bit of a problem, but a more common problem with wine is how well your video card works under linux. Using the module that came with Mandrake for my video card, some games wont even open. When I installed the module from the video card manufacturer, I was suddenly able to launch games through wine and run them at awesome speeds (actually double the framerate of windows!)

wisdom you are going to have to setup a fake windows and work from there.

how exactly can i go about doing that please can you give a lil example please so i can have a idea of what to do... and does wine uses the DLL or need to use the DLL files on my windows partition? or does it install it own on the linux partition and run off those?

Just run winesetup and select the option to setup a fake windows setup.
It sounds like you are very new to wine and dont really know much about how it works. I would recommend that you read some documentation on wine before you get too involved in trying to set it up. It's pretty self-explanitory once you read the docs.

Hello, Im a completely new user of Linux, which I means I know almost nothing on how to use things.The reason for switching from windows is abvious.... I just wanted to ask you guys, I got wine from the internet and want to install it.(in order to run winmx) But I have no idea how can I do it. I dont know any commands and stuff,i double clicked the wine installer(im running Red Hat 9.0) and it asked me how i want to run it, i chose 'run' but nothing happened. Im so lost here in Linux and dont know how to use anything but Im willing to learn some things so it can function properly. If any of you guys could help me out I would really appreciate it. Wine is in .tar.gz format and i extracted it in the folder of my computer(or 'my home' or however its called). And also Id like to install my graphics card drivers,I got a geforce fx 5700 and I downloaded the drivers but I still cant get it to work. Please help me, I like using linux that Ill never go back to Windows but I really need help from people that know. Thanks in advance and sorry if my post was a bit big

Welcome Condor.

First, as a new user, you really should stick with RPMs. Much easier to install, and a primary benefit of a redhat system. You also might consider Mandrake which is very similar, and not getting discontinued soon.

You can get an RPM version of wine from most of the same sources that you can get tars from. The RPM will be more like an "install" and should be very comfortable for you. I have preferred RPMs for years, and only install with a tar if it is a program that I REALLY want and does not have an RPM.

As for using winmx, my question is why? There are many filesharing programs for linux, many surpass winmx. I would recommend gtk-gnutella. Very easy to install and use, and has superior results compared to winmx.

As for your other questions, your best bet would be to break up your post and post the questions in the applicable forums. Good luck, and welcome to Linux!

your best bet at getting wine to run on your system is to do source install; rpm's are so generic that they may not function properly on your system

grab the latest released wine build source from www.winehq.com; untar it into some directory, then in a terminal, cd into the wine directory and do ./tools/wineinstall

this is an automated process that will compile wine for you; it will prompt you when it needs more information from you

definitely choose to do a wine-only (window-less) install and use a fake c-drive

if you want opengl enabled, edit the file tools/wineinstall and under the title "configargs", add the option enable-opengl and save the file; now you can run ./tools/wineinstall

after evertything has been installed, try running wine notepad or winemine and see what happens

I've had no problems with rpms, it's the easiest thing todo.

First, as a new user, you really should stick with RPMs. Much easier to install, and a primary benefit of a redhat system. You also might consider Mandrake which is very similar, and not getting discontinued soon.

Does that mean that redhat is going to be discontuned soon??

Ya, there was an article saying that they are discontinuing the desktop version and focusing on server projects.

However, Fedora Core is practically the same thing as RedHat; it even has the same gnome menu icon, that being a red hat. And of course FC is rpm based too.