Hi,
In WINE user guide I read int the System Administration Tips about global registry files (f.i. /usr/local/etc/wine.systemreg) But I can't find any code in WINE about it. It is obsoleted now? Is it possible to use system wide registry now?
I created an /etc/wine directory with a system.reg, userdef.reg and dosdevices file, owned by a user "wine". In the other users .wine directory, there's a individual user.reg file, and a symlink to the files in /etc/wine/. The virtual c drive is in /opt/windows, owned by wine:users This way, there's a system-wide system.reg file, and wine is more or less the admistrator. The Linux file permissions prevent others from writing to /opt/windows and system.reg. An user can modify HKLM, but the changes won't get written to disk and get lost after his wine process terminates.
Theoretically, you can use the root account instead of a special user, but it's highly discoraged to run wine as root, due to security concernes. You have to be aware that many Windows apps require full access to system directories or their install directories, but that's a problem Wine can't solve, and Windows suffers from that too.