3.1.1. Installation Overview

A Windows installation consists of many different parts.

• Registry. Many keys are supposed to exist and contain meaningful data, even in a newly-installed Windows.

• Directory structure. Applications expect to find and/or install things in specific predetermined locations. Most of these directories are expected to exist. But unlike Unix directory structures, most of these locations are not hardcoded, and can be queried via the Windows API and the registry. This places additional requirements on a Wine installation.

• System DLLs. In Windows, these usually reside in the system (or system32) directories. Some Windows applications check for their existence in these directories before attempting to load them. While Wine is able to load its own internal DLLs (.so files) when the application asks for a DLL, Wine does not simulate the existence of nonexisting files.

While the users are of course free to set up everything themselves, the Wine team will make the automated Wine source installation script, tools/wineinstall, do everything we find necessary to do; running the conventional configure && make depend && make && make install cycle is thus not recommended, unless you know what you're doing. At the moment, tools/wineinstall is able to create a configuration file, install the registry, and create the directory structure itself.

3.1.2. The Registry

The default registry is in the file winedefault.reg. It contains directory paths, class IDs, and more; it must be installed before most INSTALL.EXE or SETUP.EXE applications will work. The registry is covered in more detail here.

3.1.3. Directory Structure

Here's the fundamental layout that Windows applications and installers expect. Without it, they seldom operate correctly.

C:\                Root directory of primary disk drive
  Windows\         Windows directory, containing .INI files,
                     accessories, etc.
  System\          Win3.x/95/98/ME directory for common DLLs
                     WinNT/2000 directory for common 16-bit DLLs
  System32\        WinNT/2000 directory for common 32-bit DLLs
  Start Menu\      Program launcher directory structure
    Programs\      Program launcher links (.LNK files) to applications
  Program Files\   Application binaries (.EXE and .DLL files)

Wine emulates drives by placing their virtual drive roots to user-configurable points in the Unix filesystem, so it's your choice where C:'s root should be (tools/wineinstall will even ask you). If you choose, say, /var/wine, as the root of your virtual drive C, then you'd put this in your ~/.wine/config:

[Drive C]
"Path" = "/var/wine"
"Type" = "hd"
"Label" = "MS-DOS"
"Filesystem" = "win95"
        

With this configuration, what windows apps think of as "c:\windows\system" would map to /var/wine/windows/system in the UNIX filesystem. Note that you need to specify "Filesystem" = "win95", NOT "Filesystem" = "unix", to make Wine simulate a Windows-compatible (case-insensitive) filesystem, otherwise most apps won't work.

3.1.4. System DLLs

The Wine team has determined that it is necessary to create fake DLL files to trick many applications that check for file existence to determine whether a particular feature (such as Winsock and its TCP/IP networking) is available. If this is a problem for you, you can create empty files in the configured c:\windows\system directory to make the application think it's there, and Wine's built-in DLL will be loaded when the application actually asks for it. (Unfortunately, tools/wineinstall does not create such empty files itself.)

Applications sometimes also try to inspect the version resources from the physical files (for example, to determine the DirectX version). Empty files will not do in this case, it is rather necessary to install files with complete version resources. This problem is currently being worked on. In the meantime, you may still need to grab some real DLL files to fool these apps with.

And there are of course DLLs that wine does not currently implement very well (or at all). If you do not have a real Windows you can steal necessary DLLs from, you can always get some from one of the Windows DLL archive sites that can be found via internet search engine. Please make sure to obey any licenses on the DLLs you fetch... (some are redistributable, some aren't).