Transparently run wine programs

Question

When I want to run a wine program I have to type e.g.

$ wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/TextAloud/TextAloudMP3.exe

Would it be possible to run directly TextAloudMP3? I mean not only from command line (I could create alias) but in whole graphical environment. I'm launching programs with dmenu.

Answer 1

I guess you meant to launch exe programs with wine directly, so tell kernel to run win32 binaries with wine by,

1. Mount binfmt fs, add a line none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc defaults 0 0 to /etc/fstab and execute mount -a afterwards

2. echo ':DOSWin:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register to register the binary format

So later, you just run the exe file with /path/to/XX.exe

Note that this also introduces a security problem.

Answer 2

Make sure wine is in your path and create a shell script containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TextAloud/TextAloudMP3.exe"

Give yourself permission to execute the script by running chmod u+x SCRIPT_NAME.

Then, just run that script from your file manager. It will start wine, which will run TextAloudMP3.exe.

Answer 3

Step 0

Set a binary PATH for your user. Run mkdir ~/bin and add this directory to your PATH.

How this is done may vary depending on the shell and desktop environment you use.

Here you can found how to change your PATH in a variety of shells.

Check this solved question if your desktop environment don't care about your shell profile and the former does work from the terminal but not from the desktop environment.

Step 1

Once you have set your shell and your desktop environment to respect a new PATH, you can drop scripts there and run them as regular commands without typing their path.

Create a short shell script to run your wine program in this directory, i.e. ~/bin/textaloud:

#!/bin/bash
cd "~/.wine/drive_c"
exec wine "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TextAloud/TextAloudMP3.exe" "$@"

And give it execute permission.

chmod +x ~/bin/textaloud

There are three things to note about the above script:

• The cd path is where the program is going to be run (in which directory). Some programs may require you to run them on a specific directory. If you have trouble with this, set there that directory (usually the same where the executable is located). You may unwant this line in some cases.
• The exec commands tell bash to morph into wine with the following arguments, so this is no longer bash running wine, but bash process becoming wine. The PID remains. You don't have two processes running.
• The $@ is substituted with the arguments you ran the script, if any. So those are passed to your wine program.

Now you can run your program from the shell like...

textaloud

Step 2

Create an application launcher. Nowadays these files are standarized as .desktop files and many desktop environments provide graphical tools to create them.

Here is an example skeleton you can use to write it yourself. You may want to provide an icon (often in PNG, SVG or XPM).

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=TextAloud
Exec=textaloud
Icon=textaloud.png

Place this file in ~/.local/share/applications/TextAloud.desktop. Icons are searched (among other places) in ~/.local/share/icons, so make sure to find a cute icon for your application and place it there with the name textaloud.png.

Once you had done this, your desktop environment should find your shortcut file and be able to run the program with the script. If not, reload or restart it.

Answer 4

Have you considered trying PlayOnLinux? It can take care of the whole thing for you and even you can configure some filetypes to be opened by wine programs.