http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14502
--- Comment #2 from Erik codeslinger@compsalot.com 2008-07-15 18:23:29 --- I am/was trying to troubleshoot wines' networking not the os. the os connects just fine thank you, it is wine's unc network that is not !!! :-( not functioning.
As you observed in changing the title of this bug, wine does not include a ping utility. Since wine by default configures itself for XP it made sense to me to copy the files I needed from XP, (for which I do own a license for this cpu by the way XP->Linux ).
What I found is that XP ping does not work. I then did a bunch of research to determine why ping was not working, it was very confusing to find examples of people being able to use it but it not actually working for me, and ultimately discovered that the win98 version of ping does indeed work (regardless of the wine compatibility mode setting).
Thus this bug, which is mostly an attempt to document for others that if they need to use ping in wine then they need to use the win98 version of it.
Of course if you want to write a ping program specifically for wine, one which works around the "root" requirement, that would be great too.
However, elsewhere on this site I read a discussion in which it was suggested to simply forward the calls to the native os ping to get around the "root" problem. But now that I am thinking about it, that would be a really bad idea because it would defeat the whole reason that you are using ping in the first place, which is to test *wine's* *networking*. I think that we can take it for granted that the native os'es networking is functional, hard to download wine without it. And as you pointed out, the native os has plenty of network troubleshooting tools. But wine's networking on the other hand seems to be very non-functional. See for instance bug #14501 which is the reason I was trying to do ping in the first place.
So, ping needs to be using wine's native networking facility or else the results are meaningless.
I agree that unless there is other related breakage, there is no compelling reason to fix XP Ping, just document somewhere that people need to use win98 ping and leave it at that.