wineprefixes don't work

Question

it's that simple.

they don't

i've learned to create and call back wineprefixes (AND I ONLY WANT ONE)

but it doesn't really seem to matter.

wine or winetricks does whatever it wants and doesn't listen to you.

I type

env WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" WINEPREFIX="/home/t/./wine32" wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi

my program gets installed in wine32 without the ./

I type

env WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" WINEPREFIX="/home/t/wine32" wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi

it still installs in wine32 but also creates a .wine directory. (which was deleted to create the prefix)

I have lost all faith in wineprefixes.

they suck, they really really do.

---

I need to use 32bit version of wine 1.7.30 and install all my wine programs in the same prefix.

I also need dotnet40, corefonts and vcrun2010

how do I accomplish this master-feat of all the greek gods?

Answer 1

They do work, you just are not using the correct variable - there is a list in man wine, here are the ones you will need:

WINEARCH

• Specifies the Windows architecture to support. It can be set either to win32 (support only 32-bit applications), or to win64 (support both 64-bit applications and 32-bit ones in WoW64 mode).
• The architecture supported by a given Wine prefix is set at prefix creation time and cannot be changed afterwards. When running with an existing prefix, Wine will refuse to start if WINEARCH doesn't match the prefix architecture.

WINEPREFIX

• If set, the content of this variable is taken as the name of the directory where wine stores its data (the default is $HOME/.wine). This directory is also used to identify the socket which is used to communicate with the wineserver. All wine processes using the same wineserver (i.e.: same user) share certain things like registry, shared memory, and config file. By setting WINEPREFIX to different values for different wine processes, it is possible to run a number of truly independent wine processes.

So to create a 32bit wineprefix:

export WINEARCH="win32"
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-PROGRAM-NAME/
wineboot -u

Then use:

wine /PATH/TO/INSTALLER.exe

OR

wine msiexec /i /PATH/TO/INSTALLER.msi

in the same terminal, after the export command, or use env as I explained here to use the installers in the wine path - so:

env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32/"  wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi

The AppDB entry for Steam indicates you may need to fix font issue with steam in wine, there is a answer on that here. Comment below this post here if you have issues.

N.B. You can read up a bit on linux directory paths here.