Help using Wine
 

matt@linux:~> wine
Warning: the specified Windows directory L"c:\\windows" is not accessible.
Warning: the specified System directory L"c:\\windows\\system32" is not accessible.
Warning: could not find DOS drive for current working directory '/home/matt', starting in the Windows directory.
Wine 0.9.1
Usage: wine PROGRAM [ARGUMENTS...] Run the specified program
wine --help Display this help and exit
wine --version Output version information and exit


I get that error.

Then I found out trying to do some stuff I cannot write anyfiles to my windows partition or any other drives and partitions. It says I do not have permission. Any suggestions please?

oh yes... I am usinge SuSe 9.3

Writing to windows partition is easily answered, so I'll answer that first. Do you have write permission on the windows partition? Is it FAT or NTFS format? If it's bigger than about 30Gb it's certainly NTFS and therefore read-only to linux, unless you have NTFS support.

And problems with wine - did you install it correctly? I've never come across such an error, I usually get the latest rpm of wine and it works fine.

With wine i sorta had problems like that. downlaod the wine-tools from winehq and compile them. that creates a fake c:.../ partition in your home directry for you if the initial wine install didnt do that. you also get internet exploer...yay hmm.. and minesweeper lol. helps as some apps require internet xplorer.
Also Xena what you said i would normaly total have agreed with but when i first got my comp i installed windoz. i read the leaflet i got with my xp disk and it said that any partition over 32gb would need to be NTFS. i installed and selected FAT32 so any future lionx install could rite to it. and to my suprise it created 1 75gb FAT32 partition!!
So it is not nessesarily NTFS if it is bigger than 32 gigs.

175Gb and FAT? Well done. I've never achieved such a thing. Perhaps I should say, "if it's bigger than 30Gb then it's likely to be NTFS" :)

The partition that windows is on is 10 gigs and is NTFS.

You can not run just wine. You have to include a program that you want to run. For example 'wine notepad' will run notepad. I do not recommend using WINE to run programs off of your orginal Windows setup. WINE can corrupt the windows program and mess everything up. Just install the programs that you want to use in WINE. Let it store the program in ~/.wine/drive_c.

Writing to NTFS is very experimental. If you do write to it, all your files could be corrupted when you boot up into Windows. I normally compile the kernel with out write support for NTFS.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can not format partitions as FAT32 that are larger than 32 GB because of limitations in these versions. These versions can handle FAT32 partitions up to 2 TB. To get around the 32 GB limit issue is to use a format utility from Windows 95 or Windows 98. The format utility will have no problems formatting a few hundred gigabytes. I prefer people use FAT32 instead of NTFS because NTFS can cause problems if using poorly written programs.

Xena, I think cormack said that he or she created one 75 GB partition. I have created a 120 GB partition. I converted it to XFS because I have switch to Linux as my primary OS.

you may need to look at
winecfg
where you can associate the fake c: drive

Also on newer version of wine you may need to run once after install / compilation of wine
something called wine???? it also creates some links (cannot remember name)

The same thing just happened to me!
 

I just got very similar results, doing something after upgrading my system that I had been doing in the predecessor system with no problems:

| Warning: the specified Windows directory L"c:\\windows" is not accessible.
|
| Warning: the specified System directory L"c:\\windows\\system" is not accessible.
|
| Warning: could not find DOS drive for current working directory '/foo/bar',
| starting in the Windows directory.
|
| wine: cannot open (null)

I had been using SuSE Linux 9.0, and just upgraded to 10.0. I'm wondering whether it's more than a coincidence that both Matt and I were using SuSE versions that probably have a lot in common with one another. (BTW, "/foo/bar" is not the actual name of the directory where I was at the time - I just edited the message, since the directory name is not important. However, the directory does exist, and it does contain the same thing it always has. I have the old system on another partition, so I can prove that things still work (I assume) under SuSE 9.0).

I'm wondering whether wine could be trying to look in the "windows" directory because it can't open a DLL or some such.

Hmmmm.

--

Ahhhh. After carefully reading all the postings in this thread, and doing some poking around based on what I learned thereby, I've solved my problem, and suspect the same might work for Matt.

It turns out that I had copied my old ~/.wine directory and its contents from my old home directory when I did an upgrade from SuSE 9.0 to SuSE 10.0 - which I think gave wine indigestion. I just renamed the old .wine and ran winecfg, letting it create a new .wine dir. Now all is well.

BTW, I tend to think that all that speculation about NTFS partitions and such is a red herring - it has nothing to do with the problem, afaik. I'm running from Reiser and ext2 filesystems, partition sizes from 5 gigs to about 30 gigs. There's no Windoze nonsense involved, since everything lives on Linux filesystems.