wine: <WINEPREFIX> is not owned by you

[WineUser3]

When I try to use a WINEPREFIX directory from another user I get this error:

wine: /Path/wine_prefix is not owned by you

Wineprefixes can get very large - different packages installed with winetricks can lead to Wineprefixes over 1 GB! And I have several wineprefixes because the different games don't run with one single wineprefix. With the current owner restriction, I have to triple (!) each wineprefix for 3 users - with 100% redundant data! For a 1 GB prefix, that's total waste of 2 GB!

Now, when I simply change the owner of the wineprefix directory (e.g. via "sudo chown user2 wineprefix7"), I can use this other wineprefix directory! So a simple change of the wineprefix owner does the trick. Of course, I can'T just add a "chown" command in the start script because only one user has sudo right ... and typing in the password on each start is also bad. I tried to create a link to the wineprefix, but when I chown the link, the original diretory's owner is changed.

What is the reason that wineprefixes can't be shared between multiple users - because it CAN be shared if you just change the owner of the wineprefix main diretory?

[dimesio]

Risk of registry corruption. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11112

If you just want to save space, you can install apps to a single directory shared by multiple users outside their wineprefixes. You will have to run the installer for each user to create the needed registry entries for each, but just point the installer to the shared directory instead of accepting the default in Program Files when it asks where you want to install the app to. Make sure all users have read/write permissions for that directory.

[WineUser3]

That has nothing to do with my problem - as I already do this. I always install the games in a separate, external partition and all users start the wine games from the same directory with a general start script. The problem is the WINEPREFIX! When starting a game, I have to state the wine prefix - many games work with the standard $home/.wine prefix but some there are also games that need other wine prefixes. If each user has his own .wine prefix, it's okay (but of course still has duplicate files compared to the other user's .wine prefix). But the other games need other wine prefixes with (lots of) additional packages installed via winetricks. These prefixes can get very big (over 1 GB!), so I don't want to duplicate redundantly.

[dimesio]

Overrides can be set per app rather than globally, so you could put most things in one wineprefix per user.

[WineUser3]

Overrides doesn't help with specific winetricks packages like DirectX 9, 10, WMP, etc. I have several wineprefixes and there are games that don't work with a prefix that has additional packages compared to the wineprefix that works. So, it's not possible to have only 1 wineprefix, unfortunately.