Sweden-Number/documentation/registry

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The Registry
------------
After Win3.x, the registry became a fundamental part of Windows. It is
the place where both Windows itself, and all
Win95/98/NT/2000/whatever-compliant applications, store configuration
and state data. While most sane system administrators (and Wine
developers) curse badly at the twisted nature of the Windows registry,
it is still necessary for Wine to support it somehow.
Registry structure
The Windows registry is an elaborate tree structure, and not even most
Windows programmers are fully aware of how the registry is laid out,
with its different "hives" and numerous links between them; a full
coverage is out of the scope of this document. But here are the basic
registry keys you might need to know about for now.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
This fundamental root key (in win9x, stored in the hidden file
system.dat) contains everything pertaining to the current
Windows installation.
HKEY_USERS
This fundamental root key (in win9x, stored in the hidden file
user.dat) contains configuration data for every user of the
installation.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
This is a link to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes. It
contains data describing things like file associations, OLE
document handlers, and COM classes.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
This is a link to HKEY_USERS\your_username, i.e., your personal
configuration.
Using a Windows registry
If you point Wine at an existing MS Windows installation (by setting
the appropriate directories in wine.conf/.winerc), then Wine is able
to load registry data from it. However, Wine will not save anything to
the real Windows registry, but rather to its own registry files (see
below). Of course, if a particular registry value exists in both the
Windows registry and in the Wine registry, then Wine will use the
latter.
Occasionally, Wine may have trouble loading the Windows registry.
Usually, this is because the registry is inconsistent or damaged in
some way. If that becomes a problem, you may want to download the
regclean.exe from the MS website and use it to clean up the registry.
Alternatively, you can always use regedit.exe to export the registry
data you want into a text file, and then import it in Wine.
Wine registry data files
In the user's home directory, there is a subdirectory named .wine,
where Wine will try to save its registry by default. It saves into
four files, which are:
system.reg
This file contains HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
user.reg
This file contains HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
userdef.reg
This file contains HKEY_USERS\.Default (i.e. the default user
settings).
wine.userreg
Wine saves HKEY_USERS to this file (both current and default
user), but does not load from it, unless userdef.reg is
missing.
All of these files are human-readable text files, so unlike Windows,
you can actually use an ordinary text editor on them if you must.
In addition to these files, Wine can also optionally load from global
registry files residing in the same directory as the global wine.conf
(i.e. /usr/local/etc if you compiled from source). These are:
wine.systemreg
Contains HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
wine.userreg
Contains HKEY_USERS.
System administration
With the above file structure, it is possible for a system
administrator to configure the system so that a system Wine
installation (and applications) can be shared by all the users, and
still let the users all have their own personalized configuration. An
administrator can, after having installed Wine and any Windows
application software he wants the users to have access to, copy the
resulting system.reg and wine.userreg over to the global registry
files (which we assume will reside in /usr/local/etc here), with:
cd ~/.wine
cp system.reg /usr/local/etc/wine.systemreg
cp wine.userreg /usr/local/etc/wine.userreg
and perhaps even symlink these back to the administrator's account, to
make it easier to install apps system-wide later:
ln -sf /usr/local/etc/wine.systemreg system.reg
ln -sf /usr/local/etc/wine.userreg wine.userreg
Note that the tools/wineinstall script already does all of this for
you, if you install Wine as root. If you then install Windows
applications while logged in as root, all your users will
automatically be able to use them. While the application setup will be
taken from the global registry, the users' personalized configurations
will be saved in their own home directories.
But be careful with what you do with the administrator account - if
you do copy or link the administrator's registry to the global
registry, any user might be able to read the administrator's
preferences, which might not be good if sensitive information
(passwords, personal information, etc) is stored there. Only use the
administrator account to install software, not for daily work; use an
ordinary user account for that.
The default registry
A Windows registry contains many keys by default, and some of them are
necessary for even installers to operate correctly. The keys that the
Wine developers have found necessary to install applications are
distributed in a file called "winedefault.reg". It is automatically
installed for you if you use the tools/wineinstall script, but if you
want to install it manually, you can do so by using the regapi tool.
You can find more information about this in the
documentation/no-windows document in the Wine distribution.
The [registry] section
With the above information fresh in mind, let's look at the
wine.conf/.winerc options for handling the registry.
LoadGlobalRegistryFiles
Controls whether to try to load the global registry files, if
they exist.
LoadHomeRegistryFiles
Controls whether to try to load the user's registry files (in
the .wine subdirectory of the user's home directory).
LoadWindowsRegistryFiles
Controls whether Wine will attempt to load registry data from a
real Windows registry in an existing MS Windows installation.
WritetoHomeRegistryFiles
Controls whether registry data will be written to the user's
registry files. (Currently, there is no alternative, so if you
turn this off, Wine cannot save the registry on disk at all;
after you exit Wine, your changes will be lost.)
UseNewFormat
This option is obsolete. Wine now always use the new format;
support for the old format was removed a while ago.
PeriodicSave
If this option is set to a nonzero value, it specifies that you
want the registry to be saved to disk at the given interval. If
it is not set, the registry will only be saved to disk when the
wineserver terminates.
SaveOnlyUpdatedKeys
Controls whether the entire registry is saved to the user's
registry files, or only subkeys the user have actually changed.
Considering that the user's registry will override any global
registry files and Windows registry files, it usually makes
sense to only save user-modified subkeys; that way, changes to
the rest of the global or Windows registries will still affect
the user.
- Ove K<>ven