I’ve been reading forums. I’ve been to WineHQ. I’ve looked at the opensuse page about it. But I just don’t get it! I installed wine using Yast. I can run winecfg from the terminal. But, that’s about it. I don’t understand what it is that everybody else is talking about. Do .exe programs HAVE to be in the .wine/drive_c directory? Everyone says that wine should automatically install to the /home/username directory. Well… mine didn’t. It’s under root.Does that make a difference?
Should wine run correctly on its own? Do I have to configure it in some special way? Should I be able to just click on a .exe file and have it run with wine, or do I have to tell wine it’s there first?
—totally lost…
I hear you. Don’t understand why, but some people have the same problem.
You use wine by running:
wine application.exe
You can either do this in the folder where the .exe is located, or you can use the full path. So… “cd /path/to/application” “wine application.exe” or “wine /path/to/application/application.exe”
If you want an executable file to run through Wine just by right clicking it and selection Wine, do the following…
Right click on the file (in your file browser) that you want to run with Wine, and then in the menu that appears, click Open with Other Application…. That will open a new prompt: on this prompt there will be a list of programs to open the file with. There will also be an option at the bottom called Use a custom command. Click this and a field will appear. In the field, enter: wine and then click Open at the bottom-right of the window. Now the file will open with Wine, and then the option to open with Wine should appear when you right click again.
The one thing about Wine is that it is basically all a terminal-based emulator. As mentioned above, the files do not have to be in any specific folder to install. To install a program, find the path of the executable file and then enter into the terminal as root: wine start /path/to/the/file.exe replacing your path with the example given. I have written a tutorial about it, and rather than post the entire thing in this post, you can find it here.
I hope that helps! 
Thanks, that makes things make much more sense. I was wondering why I couldn’t find wine in the application list. Knowing about the custom command thing is really useful.
One other quick question. How do I tell wine to look for a mounted iso instead of a disk? I’ve heard that changing disks is difficult in wine, so I was wondering if I could just make an iso and mount that, but wine is looking the wrong place and I don’t know where to change that.
To find the mount locations for Wine, open a terminal and issue the winecfg command.
When the window, look for the Drives tab at the top of the configuration window. There, you will find a list of all the mount points. I’m not sure how to mount an ISO, but that would be a good place to start. If you need further information on this, I found a post about this on the Ubuntu forums that sounds like a similar question. I hope that solves your question.
I found how to mount an iso here for those not inclined to read (or if the link goes bad) it’s pretty simple:
mount -o loop <file.iso> /<directory>/
you can cd to the directory, or use the GUI. Either way it should show up like you had loaded the disk in the drive. It’ll stay like that until you either unmount it, or you restart. (haven’t checked logoff/in).
I’ll take their advice about making multiple directories and then I wont have to mount/unmount so much.
Thanks again!