Which Wine DLLs should I *not* overwrite with the real thing?

Question

I have a legit installation of Windows XP and dual boot with Ubuntu (currently Karmic). WineHQ says it's possible to use DLLs from a real installation of Windows in place of "DLLs that Wine does not currently implement very well".

So I'd like to just create softlinks that point to all of the DLLs in my real Windows System32 folder, under the theory that this would help things function better and behave in a less buggy, more native way.

But should I go as far as replacing the Wine DLLs with the real ones? If so, are there any DLLs that need to remain the way they are for compatibility with the Linux world? Which ones are safe to replace?

Also, how would this conflict/intersect with running Winetricks?

Answer 1

While you probably could replace the WINE dlls, there really is no way to determine which you can replace unless you are a developer for the Wine project. In most cases the DLLs will run just fine, by shaking up the system you are more likely to solve bugs than to solve your problems.

If you notice a particular program is having difficulty then you may want to determine where in the program the problem is happening then try to figure out WHICH dll it is that could be possibly related to the problem, then try a soft link and see if it fixes the issue.

I would stick with what Wine explicitly recommends, if replacing the dlls worked and made an improvement Wine would recommend it themselves.

Answer 2

http://appdb.winehq.org/

The AppDB lists out modifications required for every program that works under Wine. So, for the application which isn't running natively, just check with AppDB and replace DLLs accordingly..

Answer 3

gdi32.dll, kernel32.dll, and user32.dll are the lowest-level Windows libraries, and as such should not be used to replace the equivalents in wine since they will be the ones to primarily talk with the underlying OS.

wsock32.dll does TCP/IP handling, so should be left alone as well.