Installing Windows Drivers, User groups, Group policies

[saiprasadsun]

I am a newbee to this exciting Wine world. Recently as part of Hackathon we demonstrated how easy it is to launch Windows .net applications and unmanaged applications on Wine.

However I need to showcase below capabilities very soon.
1. How to install Windows Drivers (There are 10 different drivers of Ethernet, custom devices etc need to be installed on windows environment). Is it possible to install these drivers on Wine and ensure windows applications consume these drivers and work same as on windows.
2. Is it possible to configure windows user groups and group policies. Windows application expects user to be part of some custom groups (like administrator , operator..etc)

Any pointers on this will be of great help.

Regards,
Sai

[dimesio]

1. https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_W ... ardware.3F
2. No. Wine runs apps as a Windows administrator (note: this is not the same as Linux sudo/root). If an app complains about needing administrator privileges, file a bug. If you have the opposite problem (app refuses to run with administrator privileges), try the patch in https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35967.

[saiprasadsun]

Thank you for the information.
Regarding user groups, Some of the windows installers expect certain specific users/groups to be created in Windows user management and associated to Administrator group. In such case how to impersonate such users or groups to ensure windows installer proceeds without raising exception saying expected users/groups not present.

For example installer of our application expect a group with name "Master" associated with "Administrator" to be already present before installation.

[lahmbi5678]

Windows hardware drivers generally can't be installed in wine, this doesn't work atm and won't work for the next few (many) years. For 'mass' devices like network cards, printers or sound cards, USB headsets, etc it's recommended to install the linux drivers and use the linux device in wine, if possible. For more 'special' devices like USB/serial/parallel dongles and other USB hardware that needs dedicated Windows drivers (because there are no linux drivers or no interface to that devices in wine), there has been some effort to get minimalist Windows USB drivers to work, but it's still not ready for primetime. Anything more complicated like printer drivers is years away, getting beasts like Windows graphics drivers to work probably will never happen in wine.

If you really need devices like dongles, you may have better luck with running e.g. Windows XP and your applications in VMs like VMWare or VirtualBox, but that would almost completely defeat the purpose of installing/using linux. Another viable option may be using reactos, but reactos is in some way in even rougher shape than wine.

[saiprasadsun]

Thanks for the information.
Is it possible to fool windows .msi that specific user groups are present in Wine. Some of the installers are pre-programmed to check for existing Windows user groups.

[dimesio]

Test your installer in current Wine, and if it fails, file a bug.