This section describes how ODBC works within Wine and how to configure it to do what you want (if it can do what you want).
The ODBC system within wine, as with the printing system, is designed to hook across to the Unix system at a high level. Rather than ensuring that all the windows code works under wine it uses a suitable Unix ODBC provider, such as UnixODBC. Thus if you configure Wine to use the builtin odbc32.dll that wine dll will interface to your Unix ODBC package and let that do the work, whereas if you configure Wine to use the native odbc32.dll it will try to use the native ODBC32 drivers etc.
The first step in using a Unix ODBC system with Wine is, of course, to get the Unix ODBC system working itself. This may involve downloading code or rpms etc. There are several Unix ODBC systems available; the one the author is used to is unixODBC (with the IBM DB2 driver). Typically such systems will include a tool, such as isql, which will allow you to access the data from the command line so that you can check that the system is working.
The next step is to hook the Unix ODBC library to the wine builtin odbc32 dll. The builtin odbc32 (currently) looks to the environmental variable LIB_ODBC_DRIVER_MANAGER for the name of the odbc library. For example in the author's .bashrc file is the line:
export LIB_ODBC_DRIVER_MANAGER=/usr/lib/libodbc.so.1.0.0
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If that environmental variable is not set then it looks for a library called libodbc.so and so you can add a symbolic link to equate that to your own library. For example as root you could run the commands:
ln -s libodbc.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libodbc.so
/sbin/ldconfig
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The last step in configuring this is to ensure that Wine is set up to run the builtin version of odbc32.dll, by modifying the DLL configuration. This builtin dll merely acts as a stub between the calling code and the Unix ODBC library.
If you have any problems then you can use the debugmsg channel odbc32 to trace what is happening. One word of warning. Some programs actually cheat a little and bypass the odbc library. For example the Crystal Reports engine goes to the registry to check on the DSN. The fix for this is documented at unixODBC's site where there is a section on using unixODBC with Wine.