some Newbie Wine questions 7284

In addition to what CW04 Dave Mann has said, I'd add a few things that might help clarify:

I've been working on porting VB6 software into Wine lately. I haven't used it much yet but have been looking at it a lot from a Windows point of view. CW04 Dave Mann seems to be saying that you can run software from your Windows "C" drive. That may be true, but I wouldn't want to mix them up, personally. Most Windows software seems to install fine under Wine. You can just run the installer. Wine sets up a dummy Program Files and %Win% folder, with the necessary subfolders. It also creates a dummy Registry. (Again, maybe you can read your true Window Registry, but I wouldn't. ) In many cases it will even put a link on the "Start Menu".

So if you run the installer in Wine then the software will get installed into the dummy filesystem in the .wine folder, and will "feel at home". Despite the fact that the Wine filesystem is "fake", it works. Windows API calls are routed to translator libraries that convert to Linux calls. For instance, if your program makes a call to the Windows system to find the path of the %system% folder, it will get back a valid path inside the .wine folder, where any Windows system files installed will be stored. Windows software will find needed libraries if they're in the "fake" system folder, and they'll find their own program folder. Registry calls, likewise, will be routed to the fake Wine Registry.

All other parbreastions, and the rest of Linux, is seen as basically data parbreastions. In other words, Windows software thinks it's in Windows - inside the .wine folder - and generally works that way.

So far my experience has been that the programs I've tried have installed and run, though not perfectly. There are numerous small gitches here and there and software under Wine is notably slow compared to running the same software in Windows. In most cases that probably won't matter, but in some cases it might show as groggy updating of visuals or notable waits for a process to complete.

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