wine users - Jan 2009 - Re: multiple users on LINUX - way to share a single .wine

nanonyme wrote:
> Theoretically speaking: (do not consider this a guide)
> If I were to emulate what Windows works like, I'd probably have:
> a) One user who owns the global wineprefix and everything inside it is only
writable by this user (except userdir inside the "documents and
settings" equivalent) (Here be administrator)
> b) Each other user has their own wineprefixes (owner the other user,
possibly created by some setuid script) which have dosdevices and drive_c mount
binded to ones in global wineprefix folders and system.reg hardlinked to the
global system.reg. Users would have their own user.reg and userdef.reg.
> c) Some means of making sure only one user at a time can start Wine as the
user who owns wineprefix. Program installation would usually require changing
uid to that other user and running program installer.
> If registry files are separated so that system.reg contains *only* global
keys that users aren't supposed to modify, it might work. Quite a lot of
work though, you'd probably get by easier by just buying a Windows.
> Still note this is highly speculative and theoretical and probably will not
work as is. :)
> (Someone could fork a project for that kind of stuff though if they happen
to have enough scientific curiosity)

OK, so to get some clarification, I have a few questions
a) I assume that multiple prefixes can be run in Wine because it is popular to
install apps into seperate wineprefixes to isolate them... so I assume I can run
these two apps at the same time with no risk of corruption?  [Is this correct?]

b) So if I've copied my .wine folder to some shared read-only location, then
symlinked to my local .folder all the read-only shared stuff, and the files that
need to be modified (specifically profile/username, user.reg,  and perhaps temp)
are located in my local .wine folder, then why would I expect any corruption?   
[Note: I was wondering if MSOCache, DLLCache, Spool need to be local and user
modifiable as well.  I'm not sure why the userdef.reg the default user needs
to be user modifiable.]

c) If option b) does work, what precludes having an option on install that asks
you to enter your Wine Administrator password and automatically installing to
the shared .wine folder.  [run .wine under the "Windows" userid, where
it's WINEPREFIX is the /usr/share/.wine folder.]

What about making a dedicated wine user with wine installed in its home
directory
eg /home/wine/.wine 

Then when a user wants to use wine they can start up wine or winefile by running
the program as that user like:

sudo -u wine winefile

This way everybody will be running as the same user and it might also allow
multiple users to run wine at the same time without coruption because they
(might) be all using the same wineserver.

Just a guess, can't try it at work because we are being forced to use
windoze :(

~ Alien Wolf