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Bundling Windows applications

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probonopd edited this page Nov 28, 2017 · 18 revisions

Ongoing research

⚠️ CAUTION: The information on this page reflects ongoing research. Do not rely on it yet. We would appreciate your experimentation and contributions. Feel free to edit the page.

Objectives

  1. Create a version of WINE that runs from within an AppImage
  2. In order to support running 32-bit Windows executables on 64-bit Linux systems, make it possible to bundle any and all 32-bit dependencies, down to ld-linux.so.2 inside the AppImage so that it needs no 32-bit libraries to be installed on the target system
  3. Make it possible to use a read-only $WINEPREFIX that is stored inside the AppImage

Plan of attack

1. Create a version of WINE that runs from within an AppImage

For 64-bit WINE on 64-bit Linux this is relatively straightforward, but it will only be able to run 64-bit Windows executables, which are not always available, especially for legacy software that is often the reason for using WINE. Hence we will focus on 2.

2. Bundle any and all 32-bit dependencies

It appears that in order to run 32-bit Windows applications, 32-bit Windows must be used, which in turn requires 32-bit ld-linux.so.2 and glibc. But most 64-bit systems these days don't have the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed anymore.

With other programs it is usually possible to manually load the 32-bit ELF file with a private, bundled version of ld-linux.so.2 like so:

wget -c http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6-i386_2.24-9ubuntu2.2_amd64.deb
dpkg -x ./libc6*.deb .

HERE="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "${0}")")"

WINEPREFIX="$HERE/wineprefix/" \
"$HERE/lib32/ld-linux.so.2" --library-path "$HERE/lib32"
"$HERE/wine-stable/bin/wine" \
"$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/App/App.exe" "$@"

However, with WINE, this does not work. My guess is that WINE launches other WINE instances through other mechanisms in the background, which in turn don't get loaded using the specified "$HERE/lib32/ld-linux.so.2" and --library-path "$HERE/lib32".

WINE developer Alexandre Julliard answered on wine-devel:

It's not possible in standard Wine, but you could probably hack wine_exec_wine_binary() in libs/wine/config.c to add your special magic.

🚧 This needs to be done. We would highly welcome contributions.

3. Make it possible to use a read-only $WINEPREFIX

Step-by-step instructions

To be written

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