Hi,
Hmm, you are the third to answer me, but none so far have answered my questions.
Are files first looked up in dosdevices/c: and the in /mnt/windows/ if not found?
The reason I ask is that icewind dale on /mnt/windows/ does a FindFirstFileA("C:/program...") which wine translates to dosdevice/c: and ofcause does not find anything. Am I suppose to make a link to where the program is installed, as if I had installed it with wine? <<<
Wine uses a subdirectory under your home directory as its "C:" drive. So if you install Icewind Dale (or anything else) under wine, it will copy its files to "~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/...". When you start the program and it does the FindFirstA("C:\Program Files..."), wine correctly translates that back to "~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/..." for you, so everything is fine.
If you don't want to install the game in wine but rather use an existing Windows installation you should either copy and/or link to your existing installation, but bear in mind that this might - as others have already pointed out - break your installation on windows for some reason or another and is generally not suggested.
So I will try and refraise the questions:
How does wine differentiate whether I have installed a program under ~/.wine/drive_c/ or under /mnt/windows/, when it does a FindFirstFileA("c:/Program Files/")? In the first case it should translate it to ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/ and in the latter ~/.wine/dosdevices/z:/mnt/windows/Program Files/?
Wine cannot guess where your existing windows partition is mounted.
If I have a program that does this, should I then make a link from ~/.wine/drice_c/Program Files/foo to /mnt/windows/Program Files/foo? (This will work with this program, but I have newer read such recommendation).
This is one solution if you don't want to install the game under wine. It should work for everything that doesn't change the registry or install system-wide DLLs. Icewind Dale (and pretty much all other Infinity Engine based games) should work with that kludge.
--Michael
P.S.: If you're a developer, you could check out the gemrb project at Sourceforge, which tries to create an open-source crossplatform Infinity Engine implementation, which one day will run Icewind Dale (and other games) natively on Linux ;-)