shared .wine directory?

[graysky]

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory? I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

[graysky]

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory? I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

..can't edit my post!

I was going to add: should I just ln -s /path/to/.wine/c_drive?Program_files/Office in the other two user's path or...?

[Frédéric Delanoy]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 00:51, graysky <[email protected]> wrote:

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory?  I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

No. At least not easily without fiddling with permissions, and coping
with links, ...

IIRC, a version of CrossOver allows this, though (haven't tested myself)

So I'd say don't bother doing that unless you like resolving lots of
problems... (and disk space is cheap now)

Frédéric Delanoy

[dimesio]

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory? I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-f54d469 ... 0167919859

[graysky]

Nice! I'm not quiet sure what a wineprefix is in this context...?

[dimesio]

Nice! I'm not quiet sure what a wineprefix is in this context...?

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-faf9617 ... 522d490faf

[James McKenzie]

graysky wrote:

graysky wrote:

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory? I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

..can't edit my post!

I was going to add: should I just ln -s /path/to/.wine/c_drive?Program_files/Office in the other two user's path or...?

I'll give the same answer that I give everytime. One, there is an
article in the Wine FAQ that addresses this. Two: Yes it is possible,
but you don't want to do this because of possible registry corruption
issues. This is being investigated, but I will state that with the
exception of server products (which usually Office is not installed on),
Windows is a single user interface (although it can and does allow
multiple users to log onto the system.) Linux is quite different, it is
designed from the get go to be used by multiple users. Thus, you run
into the problem of installing software multiple times, once for each
valid user (that is a user with a shell login that is not privileged.)
This is a shortcoming of Windows, not of Linux.

For now, you will have to install each program for each user, separately.

James McKenzie

[Gert van den Berg]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 04:04, James McKenzie
<[email protected]> wrote:

Windows is a single
user interface (although it can and does allow multiple users to log onto
the system.)

That is not true from at least XP... (Fast user-switching alllows
multiple users to be logged in simultaneously)

Normal applications are often installed on the server editions to
allow multiple users to use them via Terminal services or 3rd party
application like Citrix. (Users working on this clients often run ALL
their applications on Windows Server)

Gert

[motub]

Is it possible to have a shared .wine directory? I have office 2007 on my machine and wish to have it accessible for three users without the need to install three copies of it.

Well, if your exact concern is having three copies of the same application taking up space, that can be avoided by installing to a mounted drive/partition accessible to all users via Wine's dosdevices.

I, for example, have a second drive, with a partition called "Gamestuff" (mounted to /media/Gamestuff), which I always set as "F:" in my WINEPREFIX (I make a new one for most every game/app I install). During the install, I never install to the default location of "C:\Program Files", but always to the "F:" drive, allowing the application to additionally create its own company name/game name folders (so MS Office would be installed to "F:\Microsoft Office\whatever"). In this way I keep all my applications in one easily-accessible place, even though they all have their own prefix.

There is no way to avoid having to run the install multiple times for multiple users, as far as I know, but you don't have to have multiple copies of the same application in order for multiple users to use the one copy (just install the subsequent installs to the same mounted location as the original and allow it to overwrite itself).

Hope this helps,
Holly

[graysky]

I, for example, have a second drive, with a partition called "Gamestuff" (mounted to /media/Gamestuff), which I always set as "F:" in my WINEPREFIX (I make a new one for most every game/app I install). During the install, I never install to the default location of "C:\Program Files", but always to the "F:" drive, allowing the application to additionally create its own company name/game name folders (so MS Office would be installed to "F:\Microsoft Office\whatever"). In this way I keep all my applications in one easily-accessible place, even though they all have their own prefix.

There is no way to avoid having to run the install multiple times for multiple users, as far as I know, but you don't have to have multiple copies of the same application in order for multiple users to use the one copy (just install the subsequent installs to the same mounted location as the original and allow it to overwrite itself).

@motub - this is an interesting idea! Two questions, just so I'm clear:

1) You're accessing your "F:" via assigning it in winecfg to /media/Gamestuff or you're accessing it by changing the WINEPREFIX as described in this wiki page that dimesio pointed out to me?

2) Are you just installing the applications/games on top of themselves to your f:\ mount point as different users?