Installing Wine On a different USB device to Ubuntu

Question

Can someone please tell me how to use Ubuntu 12.10 to install Wine onto a separate USB memory stick? I've looked for hours on the Internet with no luck so far, so help would really be appreciated.

Answer 1

Create a bootable USB with persistence mode (same kind of settings in other usb creator is also available).

Boot using it, install wine and other applications.

Answer 2

There are two possibilities that might be useful for your purposes, although because of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, we don't usually run 'portable' programs from flash drives, as one often does on Windows.

(Firstly, you should format your drive with a filesystem that fully supports permissions like ext4)

1) The first involves compiling wine, as you won't be able to install a deb to a non-standard location using the normal package manager.

As the wineFAQ mentions, you could compile wine yourself with a suitable prefix so that it is installed in a non-standard location. However, you would then have to make sure that all the right libraries, etc were linked and could be found by the program. You would have to run export LD_LIBRARY_PATH for various libraries, etc as the FAQ explains, so that your compiled wine looked for the libraries in your custom directory. You could definitely run your compiled wine from that drive once it was compiled and all the linking set up, but it might be tricky to set up the linking successfully.

2) The second involves installing wine first.

However, there is then a way you could get close to what you want and have an independent wine folder from your system default ~/.wine, and this could be done by creating a wineprefix in your flash drive.

You could format your flash drive with a filesystem that fully supports permissions like ext4, and then you can create a wineprefix on your flash drive with

WINEPREFIX=/media/UnixFlash/wine winecfg

This would be a way of running programs from the suitably formatted flash drive, and using a wineprefix would keep the applications and settings apart from the main ~/.wine folder which could be set up differently. I discuss more about wineprefixes in this answer:

• How to reset setting of Wine, avoiding uninstalling all applications in it?