Running Windows apps from my XP partition in Wine using ntfs-3g?

[Zolcos]

I am dual-booted with Windows XP and Linux. I set Wine's C: drive to the same partition as my real Windows' C: drive. In XP, I exported all the registry keys important to the programs I wanted to run, and merged them into Wine's registry using Wine's regedit. I also make sure to run them from the command line in the same directory using "wine <programname>" just like it says in the FAQ.

And yet, all my programs are still complaining about not being able to find the files and registry setting they need. They give me the "first time startup" screens and everything. What else can I do to fix this?

[radiodee1]

I don't think it's do-able. I think there are certain dll s that wine needs which are only found in ~/.wine and are different from their windows counterparts with the same name. That's just my thoughts.

At this link, in section 5.1.10 they talk about a chat channel at freenode.net. You should check it out. Maybe the folks chatting there can answer your question.

http://www.winehq.org/docs/en/wineusr-guide.html

[bigtomrodney]

Some programs work this way, however a lot of others won't as they will have essential information stored in the Windows registry. Think for example what happens when you copy a directory from Program Files on one Windows computer and copy it to another. A game perhaps...doesn't work! Often times licence information is kept there too.

[Zolcos]

Some programs work this way, however a lot of others won't as they will have essential information stored in the Windows registry. Think for example what happens when you copy a directory from Program Files on one Windows computer and copy it to another. A game perhaps...doesn't work! Often times licence information is kept there too.

In that case, if I were to isolate the important registry keys, export them to .reg files, and use Wine's regedit to merge them into the Wine registry, wouldn't that make the information available to the apps running under Wine?

[cdn_penguin]

Wine is not a complete re-implementation of Windows. There are a lot of things that are missing and will likely break your app.

First, I would try installing it fresh under wine just to see if this app even works under wine. You can then try sharing the install folder on your windows folder. Since you cannot share the original windows registry (wine has its own, separate registry), this app probably treats wine as a totally different computer. If it is too smart, simply importing the same registry keys will not do. Of course I am only guessing since I have not tried this, and I have no idea what software package you are trying to get to work. I also have no idea _why_ you would want to do this. With the information at hand, I would suggest a different approach.

Personally I have a purchased a copy of VMware workstation (any cross platform virtualization product should work). If I need to be in Windows I just use vmware player to open the same vm where those windows apps live.

Best of luck.

[i92guboj]

If you intend to use something under wine, my advise is to install it under wine and save yourself some time and a lot of frustration.