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3.2. Installing Wine Without Windows

Written by James Juran <juran@cse.psu.edu>

(Extracted from wine/documentation/no-windows)

A major goal of Wine is to allow users to run Windows programs without having
to install Windows on their machine. Wine implements the functionality of the
main DLLs usually provided with Windows. Therefore, once Wine is finished, you
will not need to have windows installed to use Wine.

Wine has already made enough progress that it may be possible to run your
target applications without Windows installed. If you want to try it, follow
these steps:

 1. Create empty C:\windows, C:\windows\system, C:\windows\Start Menu, and C:\
    windows\Start Menu\Programs directories. Do not point Wine to a Windows
    directory full of old installations and a messy registry. (Wine creates a
    special registry in your home directory, in $HOME/.wine/*.reg. Perhaps you
    have to remove these files).
   
 2. Point [Drive C] in ~/.wine/config to where you want C: to be. Refer to the
    Wine man page for more information. Remember to use "Filesystem" = "win95"!
   
 3. Use tools/wineinstall to compile Wine and install the default registry. Or
    if you prefer to do it yourself, compile programs/regapi, and run:
   
                        programs/regapi/regapi setValue < winedefault.reg
                  
 4. Run and/or install your applications.
   
Because Wine is not yet complete, some programs will work better with native
Windows DLLs than with Wine's replacements. Wine has been designed to make this
possible. Here are some tips by Juergen Schmied (and others) on how to proceed.
This assumes that your C:\windows directory in the configuration file does not
point to a native Windows installation but is in a separate Unix file system.
(For instance, "C:\windows" is really subdirectory "windows" located in "/home/
ego/wine/drives/c").

  * Run the application with --debugmsg +module,+file to find out which files
    are needed. Copy the required DLLs one by one to the C:\windows\system
    directory. Do not copy KERNEL/KERNEL32, GDI/GDI32, or USER/USER32. These
    implement the core functionality of the Windows API, and the Wine internal
    versions must be used.
   
  * Edit the "[DllOverrides]" section of ~/.wine/config to specify "native"
    before "builtin" for the Windows DLLs you want to use. For more information
    about this, see the Wine manpage.
   
  * Note that some network DLLs are not needed even though Wine is looking for
    them. The Windows MPR.DLL currently does not work; you must use the
    internal implementation.
   
  * Copy SHELL/SHELL32 and COMDLG/COMDLG32 COMMCTRL/COMCTL32 only as pairs to
    your Wine directory (these DLLs are "clean" to use). Make sure you have
    these specified in the "[DllPairs]" section of ~/.wine/config.
   
  * Be consistent: Use only DLLs from the same Windows version together.
   
  * Put regedit.exe in the C:\windows directory. (Office 95 imports a *.reg
    file when it runs with an empty registry, don't know about Office 97).
   
  * Also add winhelp.exe and winhlp32.exe if you want to be able to browse
    through your programs' help function.
   
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