Using wine from exec() in a plugin

[tmiranda]

I need help from a linux guru on how to launch a program in wine from within a plugin using exec(). I can launch wine (and the windows program) but it only runs if I set the owner of wine's home directory to root.

I've installed wine (on Ubuntu) as user tom. I'm running sage as root (as far as I know I must do that) using the command "sudo ./startsage".

I am using the following Java code to setup the environment and launch comskip:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command, env);

If the owner of /home/tom/.wine is "tom" wine gives me an error saying:

wine: /home/tom/.wine is not owned by you

If I change the owner of /home/tom/.wine to root wine works properly. How do I get this to work? Is there a way to launch wine as a user instead of as root?

[bcjenkins]

Could you check if /root/.wine exists else run winecfg?

You can also run a command as a user as such:

su -c 'command with paramters' user

But I would think you couldn't guarantee which user to run the command as.

B

[tmiranda]

Lot's of issues to figure out with this. For now I'm just copping out and having the user select the .wine directory in the configuration. It's only an issue with linux (maybe Mac too, but no way for me to test) and I figure anybody who is using linux must know what they are doing so setting this parameter won'e be a big deal.

I think forcing root to OWN the directory (assuming wine is installed as a user) IS a big deal because once root owns .wine nothing can be run under wine as the user anymore. Ugly.

Unfortunately I know just enough about linux to be dangerous.

[bcjenkins]

You could run this during install on linux:

if ! [[ -d ~/.wine ]]; then winecfg; fi

[tmiranda]

I've got close to 0 bash experience. I'm assuming this checks to see if the .wine directory exists in the root's home, and if it does not it runs winecfg?

winecfg uses a GUI and I have no idea how to run that during the plugin install process.

[bcjenkins]

In my testing I didn't need a .wine directory it was created on the first go. Also, running the command above will check to see if the user's home directory has the .wine directory. It won't matter who the user is. If you assume root, you would be wrong in my usage of sagetv.

What happens when you just run the comskip command without specifying the wine cfg directory?


B

[tmiranda]

In my testing there needed to be an environment variable WINEPREFIX set to point to where the .wine directory was located. I think it also needs WINEPATH so I set that as well. If the environment variable was not set wine would not run.

I'm a complete novice with wine and open to advice and constructive criticism. I never even installed wine until I started testing this plugin. (Although I have drunk a lot of wine over the years, but that is another story.)

The kludgy solution I have in mind is to tell users to make a dedicated user, run winecfg as that user, chown the .wine directory to root and then point the plugin at that directory. It's ugly but it will work for now.

I'm shooting to release a beta this weekend so I may have to settle for that kludge until I can figure out something better.

Advice welcome.

[tmiranda]

Thanks to bcjenkins I think I have a possible solution. My plan is to use sudo to run wine as a user. It sounds easy enough which makes me believe I have missed something really obvious.

Thoughts?