Now that you hopefully managed to successfully install the Wine program files, this chapter will tell you how to configure the Wine environment properly to run your Windows programs.
First, we'll give you an overview about which kinds of configuration and program execution aspects a fully configured Windows environment has to fulfill in order to ensure that many Windows programs run successfully without encountering any misconfigured or missing items. Next, we'll show you which easy helper programs exist to enable even novice users to complete the Wine environment configuration in a fast and easy way. The next section will explain the purpose of the Wine configuration file, and we'll list all of its settings. After that, the next section will detail the most important and unfortunately most difficult configuration part: how to configure the file system and DOS drive environment that Windows programs need. In the last step we'll tell you how to establish a working Windows registry base. Finally, the remaining parts of this chapter contain descriptions of specific Wine configuration items that might also be of interest to you.
Formerly a part of: "WWN #52 Feature: Replacing Windows". Written by Ove Kåven <ovek@arcticnet.no>
A Windows installation is a very complex structure. It consists of many different parts with very different functionality. We'll try to outline the most important aspects of it.
Registry. Many keys are supposed to exist and contain meaningful data, even in a newly-installed Windows.
Directory structure. Applications expect to find and/or install things in specific predetermined locations. Most of these directories are expected to exist. But unlike Unix directory structures, most of these locations are not hardcoded, and can be queried via the Windows API and the registry. This places additional requirements on a Wine installation.
System DLLs. In Windows, these usually reside in the system (or system32) directory. Some Windows programs check for their existence in these directories before attempting to load them. While Wine is able to load its own internal DLLs (.so files) when the program asks for a DLL, Wine does not simulate the existence of nonexisting files.
While the users are of course free to set up everything themselves, the Wine team will make the automated Wine source installation script, tools/wineinstall, do everything we find necessary to do; running the conventional configure && make depend && make && make install cycle is thus not recommended, unless you know what you're doing. At the moment, tools/wineinstall is able to create a configuration file, install the registry, and create the directory structure itself.