[Wine] Re: Using a real windows installation as a wineprefix

ischou
Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:52:45 -0000

There are two separate issues.

Never ever set WINEPREFIX to an existing windows installation, for instance if
you have windows on a dual-boot separate partition.  Wine will break that
windows installation by "updating" Windows with Wine's DLLs.

However, if there are programs that you "installed" in windows that
didn't really need to be installed, then you can invoke wine with the path
to the application.  Some applications come with installers, but don't
really install anything outside of what it put into it's installed directory
(no DLLs in \Windows\System32, no registry entries, etc...).  I've run quite
a few programs from my windows partition without copying them.  That being said,
I've also run into problems with those programs.  For instance, I often run
into a problem where the program is unable to write files because the partition
is NTFS or FAT-32.