wine users - Sep 2010 - Using WINE to install device drivers for Windows XP

23 Sep 2010

I have a dual boot using two separate hard disks. Win XP is installed on sda and
Ubuntu 10.04 on sdb. I have installed WINE on sdb.

Can I use WINE to install a device driver for Win XP from sdb without starting
Win XP?

When I try to start WinXP it gives a message about the lack of a suitable device
driver for my NVIDIA video card then stops booting. I want to install a new
driver and see if Win XP will accept it.


-Novice

No. That won't work. At least it would not be straight forward at all. The
reason is that installing drivers alters the registry hives loaded in memory
(when done from Windows), and the Windows registry and the Wine registry are
formatted differently. If not for this, I think it technically could be possible
if you configured your wine directories to clobber your windows directories.
Still this would be a very bad and dangerous idea.

The short answer, again, no.