Running Wine

Written by John R. Sheets

How to run Wine

Wine is a very complicated piece of software with many ways to adjust how it runs. With very few exceptions, you can activate the same set of features through the configuration file as you can with command-line parameters. In this chapter, we'll briefly discuss these parameters, and match them up with their corresponding configuration variables.

You can invoke the wine --help command to get a listing of all Wine's command-line parameters:

Usage: ./wine [options] program_name [arguments]

Options:
   --debugmsg name  Turn debugging-messages on or off
   --dll name       Enable or disable built-in DLLs
   --dosver x.xx    DOS version to imitate (e.g. 6.22)
                    Only valid with --winver win31
   --help,-h        Show this help message
   --managed        Allow the window manager to manage created windows
   --version,-v     Display the Wine version
   --winver         Version to imitate (win95,nt40,win31,nt2k,win98,nt351,win30,win20)
        

You can specify as many options as you want, if any. Typically, you will want to have your configuration file set up with a sensible set of defaults; in this case, you can run wine without explicitly listing any options. In rare cases, you might want to override certain parameters on the command line.

After the options, you should put the name of the file you want wine to execute. If the executable is in the Path parameter in the configuration file, you can simply give the executable file name. However, if the executable is not in Path, you must give the full path to the executable (in Windows format, not UNIX format!). For example, given a Path of the following:

[wine]
"Path"="c:\windows;c:\windows\system;e:\;e:\test;f:\"
      

You could run the file c:\windows\system\foo.exe with:

$ wine foo.exe
      

However, you would have to run the file c:\myapps\foo.exe with this command:

$ wine c:\myapps\foo.exe
      

Finally, if you want to pass any parameters to your windows application, you can list them at the end, just after the executable name. Thus, to run the imaginary foo.exe Windows application with its /advanced mode parameter, while invoking Wine in --managed mode, you would do something like this:

$ wine --managed foo.exe /advanced
      

In other words, options that affect Wine should come before the Windows program name, while options that affect the Windows program should come after it.