I have WINE installed under Mdk 9.2. I can run Notepad which is installed along with WINE. Does the installation of WINE create a directory structure for Windows apps to run or does one have to manually create it? I do not see any directory structure under my home directory.

Depends. Did you compile it from source or install and .rpm? I installed it from source and it created a fake windows drive in /home/$user/c/

I installed WINE from the Mandrake RPM. If the fake windows is not created during installation from a RPM, how do Notepad and Mineweeper run?

Have you clicked on "view" and then "show hidden files" to see if it's there?
If it did'nt create the fake windows, go to /usr/bin and find the executable called wine config(I believe) and run it and it will walk you through it. Is your system dual booted? if so you can run some programs from your windows partition with wine.

i read somewhere that notepad.exe actually comes with wine, just so you can use it for testing purposes. if you're a hands-on kinda guy, you can manually edit your wine config file for maximum customization. it should be $HOME/.wine/config

"Is your system dual booted? if so you can run some programs from your windows partition with wine."

Yes, I have Win XP Home installed as well. How can I run Word installed under XP using WINE. I can see winword.exe on the NTFS partition. I tried the following command

wine /mnt/win_c/"Program Files"/"Microsoft Office"/Office/winword.exe

but got an exception message

fixme:seh:EXC_RtlRaiseException call to unimplemented function msi.dll.MsiSetExternalUI

I get the same kind of errors when trying to run Windows programs under WINE. The only program I've managed to run successfully is DC++.

I guess you have to configure wine. I have both used wine to run stuff from a installed win2000 and from scratch with absolutely nothing. To get it working just empty, well.... to do it in a organized fashion, create a ~/windows/ directory (I use it as the C, create the necessary folders in it (~/windows/windows [C:\windows], ~/windowswindows/system, ~/windows/windows/system32, ... ) ... and edit the ~/.wine/config file to use it.

If you want to use it to run stuff you have installed in the windows you have running alongside with linux, then use the ~/.wine/config file to tell wine how your windows system is running (the most important thing is the partition types and letters.... though it's not the only detail to be careful about).

Either case it's not that difficult. Just read the documentation at /usr/share/doc/wine*.
there you can see how to do it.

PS.. Oh, one detail... if you are trying to access a NTFS partition, that could be the problem, cause (probably) it's mounted read-only... and so if the program wants to write just a little bit of anything, a exception is gonna raise. You could consider mounting it read-write..... but I think it's still in "experimental" development stage.. I might be wrong anyway. Good luck!

My duel boot is with win me but it should'nt be to much different. here's how I do it. I go to my KDE start menu, I click on quick browser(mandrake 9.1) I go to root dir ,then mnt then windows, from there I go to Program Files , Then I look for the exe. file that I want to "try" to run,I say try because not all of them will work, but you can experiment , then I click on the exe. file ,KDE will give me the gui screen that askes "open with" I click on the small file folder at the top and get another window, from this I choose, /usr then /bin and finally the "wine" executable from the /bin folder. This will put /usr/bin/wine into the address bar of that first gui, then I click O K , you should see the hour glass icon spinning at the bottom while wine is attempting to load the program, and if everything worked your windows program will open. You should only have to go thru all that gui stuff once, the first screen will have a drop down list and it should keep the /usr/bin/wine file in memory. I've been able to run Adobe Photo 3.0 and windows Media Player and a few more and then the new kinda wore off and I just do all that same stuff in Linux. Good Luck . Hope this helps.