Noobie Questions: Wine and XP

[kelagedart]

Hello all, I am new to this forum and while I have used Wine for a long time, I am only now trying to get a handle on it, so am somewhat ingorant of alot of the culture and technical terms here.

Any good links to tutorials in essay style would be greatly appreciated. Man page giberish is in a language I could never grok.

First my perspective:
I am not a gamer, and with an ancient Nvidia card that happily runs on Vesa (or whatever the thing is using) I am about totally in the dark on video issues.
I have decided that XP is the end of the M$ line for me. My goal is to eventually convert nearly all my systems over to Debian Testing/LMDE, and in order to do that I need to get as much as possible M$ software functioning on Linux.

I have mainly switched over to LibreOffice (even in Win) but do prefer Excel and Powerpoint, and the 2007 versions seem to work fine.

I have a rather sizeable Win install on another partition (i dual boot).
Rather than waste enormus amounts of space - would it be possible to simply symlink most of the system32 dir over, as well as advising on what other fiels and directories wouuld be needed?
This is XP Pro SP3.

I am not so sure I like the space wasted by bottles and prefixes, and not even really sure what the differences are between them. I would want a *main* Win setup dir (either on NTFS or EXT3/4) and symlinks to any duplicated stuff.

Are there any apps that can bring to life an XP desktop with major functionality?
I am not adverse to running apps made for the 7/8 stuff but want nothing to do with the bloat of the extra services. M$ has tried to kil XP, and I am hoping that Wine, and possibly the Open SOurce effort to keep XP alive could return the favor.

My main interests are actually database and server tools, and while Linux clearly excels in this aspect, some M$ stuff i still preferable, and even needed in certan areas.

I do believe there is a tool to take an M$ binary and have it spit all all its dependencies, and hopefully, versions. I believe Win does a certain form of version anagment, just not sure of the particulars or the mechanics of dealing with it....

[dimesio]

Any good links to tutorials in essay style would be greatly appreciated.

The FAQ is a good place to start.

I have a rather sizeable Win install on another partition (i dual boot).
Rather than waste enormus amounts of space - would it be possible to simply symlink most of the system32 dir over, as well as advising on what other fiels and directories wouuld be needed?

No, and I think you don't understand how Wine works. The dlls in the wineprefix's /system32 directory are all fake, designed to fool apps that don't work if they don't find a file in that directory. What Wine actually uses are the dll.so files in /usr/lib/wine.

I am not so sure I like the space wasted by bottles and prefixes, and not even really sure what the differences are between them.

A "bottle" is merely Codeweavers' term for a wineprefix.

I would want a *main* Win setup dir (either on NTFS or EXT3/4) and symlinks to any duplicated stuff.

You can install all your apps to one wineprefix, though most experienced users use separate ones as it avoids a lot of problems. However, the wineprefix must be on a native Linux filesystem, and apps have to be installed in Wine. Running apps from a Windows partition is not supported. You can try it, and it may work for some apps (ones that don't require installing will usually work), but any problems you encounter are yours to solve.

Are there any apps that can bring to life an XP desktop with major functionality?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. The XP "desktop" is part of XP; it can't be installed separately from the operating system. If you just want the look and feel of XP, you can probably find a Linux desktop environment that can be made to resemble it.