wine users - Aug 2008 - Multiple Users

I could not find another thread that talked about this but all my searched
pulled up manny manny results so I may have overlooked some.

The problem I have is that I recently upgraded my ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 and the
new version of wine (1.1.2) has broken my setup. I run a machine with multiple
user (5) and to simplify my life all there Microsoft software they needed was
installed under wine and they used linux to do everything else. Every user has
the exact same software installed but some have there icons hidden and some not.
Since everyone is basically the same everyone has the same .wine folder. It sits
in the home directory and is sym-linked to each users account. I set up one wine
system from my account and all the changes/additions are sen by everyone else.

After doing the update everything is broken because the wine project implemented
a rule that you have to own the wine folder that you are executing. But in my
case no one owns that folder. I understand it's to keep people from running
as root but that is not the case here it it's still causing a problem.
Besides that fact that I think it's a fundamentally bad idea anyway I
can't find a work around because wine is insisting now that it own the .wine
folder. This is VERY frustrating because what has worked is now broken and there
is no clear path to fix it. if anyone has any ideas please let me know.

slick666 wrote:
> I could not find another thread that talked about this but all my searched
pulled up manny manny results so I may have overlooked some.
> 
> The problem I have is that I recently upgraded my ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 and
the new version of wine (1.1.2) has broken my setup. I run a machine with
multiple user (5) and to simplify my life all there Microsoft software they
needed was installed under wine and they used linux to do everything else. Every
user has the exact same software installed but some have there icons hidden and
some not. Since everyone is basically the same everyone has the same .wine
folder. It sits in the home directory and is sym-linked to each users account. I
set up one wine system from my account and all the changes/additions are sen by
everyone else.
> 
> After doing the update everything is broken because the wine project
implemented a rule that you have to own the wine folder that you are executing.
But in my case no one owns that folder. I understand it's to keep people
from running as root but that is not the case here it it's still causing a
problem. Besides that fact that I think it's a fundamentally bad idea anyway
I can't find a work around because wine is insisting now that it own the
.wine folder. This is VERY frustrating because what has worked is now broken and
there is no clear path to fix it. if anyone has any ideas please let me know.

What you doing is wrong. There are reasons why each user have to have their own
~/.wine directory.

Wine is a single user app.

Joonas Saraj??rvi wrote:
> Is there any common solution to the problem of two users wishing to
> use the same piece of software? For example, many games let different
> players share hiscores and other game history, like towns in SimCity.
> 

No Wine can't do that. You can only share files read only. Not read/write.
And of course you can not share registry otherwise it will become corrupted.
Each of your users have to have their own separate copy of ~/.wine directory.


Joonas Saraj??rvi wrote:
> Many programs are also very large when installed, so I'd like to avoid
> installing multiple copies. 

The only thing you can share are the executables that are not modified. Use
symlinks. But everything else have to be duplicated.