wine: sharing apps between windows and linux
 

Hello all.

Just starting with wine, and Windows XP is dual booting. All my non-linux partitions are NTFS, so I am guessing that if any apps I have already installed under Windows XP on NTFS partitions are started with Wine, and need to write to disk, they are going to fail.

Is that assumption right? The logical follow on to this is if I want a single install of a windows application that can run on both Windows XP and linux on the same machine, then I am going to have to install them into a vfat32 partition?

Right so far? I heard somewhere that NTFS write support was going to be in-kernel pretty soon, can anyone tell me about this?

I haven't searched for that last bit yet, so I'll do that first.

Cheers,

koan

You're not meant to use wine that way. Wine will set up a fake windows drive somewhere on your linux partition and you're meant to install a brand new version (through wine) of that program onto said partition.

Ok, I need to go through the install so that wine knows all the config and can set up the fake registry and all that.

But if I install the app to the exact same place as my existing windows installation... I mean, there isn't any value in having the entire program installed twice on my system is there?

You might be OK then. I don't know since I rarely use wine and I haven't run windows under FAT32 for at least 4 years.

If you don't have NTFS write support enabled in your kernel, and/or that kernel is not part of the 2.6 series (which is where the NTFS write support supposedly stabilized-- I don't know, because I don't use NTFS), and if the partition is not mounted as rw, yes, it's going to fail.

But it may not be necessary to reinstall the game under Wine if it's already installed under Windows-- just cd to the directory and try running wine <program_name>. This often works (although you won't be able to save if the above criterion are not met, or you don't change the save directory to someplace that you can write to).

Some apps require specific Registry entries to run, though; in that case, under Windows, you might export the relevant Registry entries, and then import them into the Wine registry (using wine regedit, then importing normally).

And of course, some games won't install under Wine (without some native Windows files, which you can place in your fake_windows directory if you aren't a purist), but some of those that will not install will nonetheless run under Wine, so if there is no Loki installer for the game, you can try installing it under Windows, then copying the installed game to the fake_windows directory (or wherever you install your Wine games under Linux), exporting and importing Registry entries as above, and running the game from a native Linux partition.

On the whole, though, it is better to run any Windows games that you want accessible from both OSes from a FAT32 partition-- to be honest, I don't even know what Wine's status is with respect to NTFS, but we do know that it's quite reliable with FAT32.

Lastly, two points:

1. Look for native Linux apps/games to replace the ones you're using under Windows. You'd be surprised at what you might find.... if you don't know or know where to look, The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux. (Official site) might help you get started;

2. Don't plan as if you'll be dual-booting forever. As you get more accustomed to Linux, you might well find that you don't spend much time in Windows at all, and then what's the point of having gone to all this trouble to keep the games/apps accessible under an OS you hardly ever use?

Hope this helps, but with Wine, everything is in the details, and you haven't given many. Specific programs need specific treatment in order to run, and every program is different in what it needs. So if you told us more about what in particular you're concerned about, we might be able to help you more.

So too might http://www.frankscorner.org, which has a lot of info on getting particular apps to run under Wine, and there's always The Wine Application Database, which is oldish, but still has quite a bit of relevant information.

Good luck.

No, NTFS support is the 2.6 kernels is stable but not very featureful. You can only change a file (not create one) and the filesize after you change it has to be exactly the same as before. If you want to do what you've described above you'll have to use FAT32.

Thanks for the excellent post motub, et al.