BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Tag: Wine

winepath

June 28, 2009 /

I have all these little scripts in my $HOME/bin directory to ease the execution of Windows programs. For instance, I don’t like to type the full path to Excel Viewer every time when I need to view an Excel sheet in Linux:

#!/bin/sh
"/home/bigsmoke/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/OFFICE11/XLVIEW.EXE" "$*"

This works pretty well, except when trying to view a document that’s not in the current directory:

xlview "/tmp/Some Excel sheet sent to me by someone.xls"

To make that work, you need to use a handy utility that comes with Wine, winepath. With winepath, I can modify the script to work (the example is for wordview):

#!/bin/bash
path=`winepath --windows "$*"`
"/home/bigsmoke/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/OFFICE11/WORDVIEW.EXE" "$path"

This, together with Linux’s binfmt_misc makes executing Windows programs on Linux a breeze.

Native execution of Windows programs on Linux

June 28, 2009 /

When I installed this laptop last year, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of vanilla Wine (and Gentoo’s default Wine configuration). At that time, my only memory of Wine was that getting anything useful to work took work and that your best bet to get anything working was to install CrossOver Office. Things change and in the meantime Wine has even come to version 1.0.

I want to write down what I had to do to be able to execute Windows executables as if they are Linux native. This can be done thanks to Linux’ support for misc. binaries.

First, you have to enable CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC in your kernel configuration. If it was configured as a module, run /sbin/modprobe binfmt_misc.

Then you have to register the appropriate binary formats:

':windows:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

That’s it. Of course, the .exe files need to have their executable bit set:

chmod u+x program.exe

Done.

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