wine users - Aug 2009 - Just saw a great question/idea - Wine & Windows support

Someone on the Ubuntu LinkedIn group just asked this question and I thought it
was really interesting but didn't know if it had been thought of before so
not wanting to assume something I thought I'd repost his question here:

                                    = = = = = = = = = = 

A new way to run windows applications and programs in linux?

With all the virtual machines out there and with Wine I started thinking about
how these methods are allowing linux users to run the Windows programs that
often are a necessity. Then another question popped into my head and I wondered:

Is it possible for people with dual boot computers, since they already have the
windows system files on their hard drive and they are accessible through linux,
to somehow make a program that finds these files and uses them in linux when
ever you want to use a windows program?

For example, say you want to use an engineering program that is only available
for windows. Could it be possible to make a program like Wine that lets you
install the engineering program in your linux OS by searching your hard drive
for the necessary Windows system files and opening them so that the program can
install itself?

Basically acting like the Windows partition is part of the Linux OS and the
engineering program doesn't know it is being installed in linux because this
program will only show the engineering program the windows files it needs.

By the way... one reply the person got to his question on Ubuntu LinkedIn forum
was this:

With wine, you can do this pretty easily. Just mount your windows partitions,
and map them to the correct drive letters on the wine.cfg file.

That's it.

Everything will be instantly available (With more or less success) I was afraid
of possible register corruption.... But I used it a lot and never happened, and
I felt always relatively safe.