at my company we have the need to run a specific window application within a sandbox on windows itself. Anything (including the application) that is not data produced by the application itself has to be on a read-only filesystem.
We decided we'll use wine for the task, within a virtualbox environment that will act as a sandbox. There are a few questions that I'd like to ask in order to achieve this goal.
Is there already a wine-only distro we can use? If not, what distro do you suggest we use as a base? I've read good things about DSL and Slax, what do you suggest? The boot time has to be short and the user doesn't have to notice it's actually running the application in a virtualized environment.
Does wine run off a read-only filesystem?
The application actually needs to be installed on the host system and accessed by wine by mouting the host filesystem within the virtualized enviroment (VirtualBox offers a specific function for this): how to tell Wine where to put the C drive? Symlink $HOME/.wine/c_drive to whatever I need?
1) It's tempting to recommend a stripped-down ubuntu as the base
environment, if only because that way you can be sure of security updates.
2) it depends on the app. Some apps expect to be able to write
to their install directory, for instance. You can do tricks like using
a copy-on-write filesystem or aufs mount, and throw away the
changes after each run. You can also make all the files be
symlinks to readonly files, in those directories that the game requires
to be writeable.
3) You can set WINEPREFIX, use a symlink for ~/.wine, or
you can set ~/.wine/dosdevices/c: to be a symlink to somewhere.
