WINE users configuration

I'm rebuilding an Ubuntu system and this is a problem that I had on my original installation.

The issue is this: In my home account I installed apps into Wine and all is good. However, I have a second account that I use for work purposes. So, I open Wine in the second account and it turns out that my home account Wine apps are not installed. So, basically I had to install the apps into the second user account as well. This is really inefficient since it's about 600MB worth of apps. (At the time I was new to linux and didn't have time to do this properly.)

Anyway, since I'm essentially starting over, what I'd like to do is have Wine apps installed and available to multi users.

The question: How do I make Wine apps available to multiple users?

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Wine does not properly support multiple users in the Linux sense. "Bad things" happen if two different users attempt to use the same Wine Prefix (a wine installation such as ~/.wine) at the same time.

However, if this isn't something you need to worry about then you will want to create a folder with permissions accessible by both users, and then create a symlink to it as ~/.wine.

Solution 2:

I did find:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3205534

All that you would have to do is follow the steps and make the 2 accounts part of the existing group plugdev by going to System > Administration > Users and Groups and editing the "Group" property to "plugdev"

Update: Wine implemented an extra security check to prevent using wine as root ( http://wine.1045685.n5.nabble.com/Bug-30647-New-WINEPREFIX-quot-not-owned-by-you-quot-unnecessarily-restrictive-td5703178.html ), as such this solution to share the whole .wine folder among multiple users no longer works. In case you receive the error ".wine is not owned by you", instead of sharing the whole .wine folder to /home/wine, only do it for the .wine/drive_c folder.