hi, i was wondering...

forgetting the fact that you can't write to an NTFS partition...

Is it possible to use my windows installation as the wine folder, so that i may use the games and programs that i installed on windows before i switched to Ubuntu Dapper (my games and programs are also on different partitions to the windows partition)?

this would be cool, as then i wouldn't have to reinstall everything (some of which wouldn't work anyway), have both windows and linux programs, all with XGL!!!

that would be fantastic...

Thnx for your opinions

I believe it's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it, since wine has its own configuration ideas that may not match your existing setup.

But you can run programs from an existing installation. All you need to do is mount the partion, cd into the program directory and run "wine program.exe" from there. I've even run programs myself over a samba share.

I doubt all programs will work this way, but many will. Since wine does, however, use its own registry instead of the Windows one, any program settings and whatnot that are recorded there in Windows will not be available in wine. This could also break some programs that require access to registration keys, for example. But you might be able to "reinstall" it through wine to get the program properly registered in wine. It really depends on the app. You'll just have to experiment to see what works.

Oh, and it IS possible to safely write to NTFS drives if you use the captiveNTFS driver wrapper, instead of the Linux NTFS driver.

k then...

how safe is the write capability? as in is there any chance i'll screw up windows?

So if i run, say macromedia, from my existing installation, will it work perfectly?

and if say i run thunderbird from my existing partion, will all the changes i make in linux be there in windows?

thnx

Actually, I've never used captive NTFS, but everything I've heard is that it's safe. The actual driver is the same as Windows uses after all.

Wine itself is still beta, and doesn't support everything yet. Some programs run almost perfectly, some have lots of bugs and strange behaviors, and yet others just won't run at all. It's all down to the individual application and what it requires to run. Start by checking the winehq application database to see what others have gotten running so far. Then you can experiment yourself with different settings and builtin/native .dll combinations. And don't forget to read the wine manual thoroughly (again on winehq).

Whether any changes will be available in both systems depends on where they are stored. If they are stored in the registry, then no, they won't carry back because the registries are different. But if the changes are stored in files in the installation directory, then they should be available in both OS's.

I don't know how Thunderbird will work exactly, since mail and settings are stored in a separate profile folder that's different under each system. You might be able to set up some kind of linking or syncing system so that the profiles are accessable by both systems. Or perhaps someone else has a better idea about that. I'll bet it's been discussed before. I suggest you do some searching.