Ubuntu Wine - cannot find C:\\windows\\system32?

Question

I have installed wine 1.8 and winetricks on my Xubuntu 16.04 but I have the error below when I try to install an exe file:

wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\\system32\\Set-up.exe"

Any ideas why and how I can fix it?

Answer 1

Run the Configure Wine application from the launcher or open a terminal with CtrlAltT and issue the command winecfg Either way you will get a Configuration Window for Wine. Insure that you are emulating the right version of Windows for your application and that the settings on all the tabs are sane. Drive Mapping Example Below:

Note: In a typical installation of Wine The directory noted in your question can be found at ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and you can examine the content with the command.

ls ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32

You can find the location of the Set-up.exe file in your question with the terminal command find ~/.wine -name Set-up.exe provided it's anywhere close to where it's supposed to be.

On the off chance you've placed it somewhere outside the Wine drive mapping environment you should be able to locate it with the command sudo find / -name Set-up.exe

If anything in this answer is unclear please leave me a comment and I'll do my best to clarify.

Answer 2

If you don't provide full path (or relative path), wine will only search in "c:\windows\system32"

Just execute your file along with the path

# wine ./Set-up.exe

Replace ./ with another path if the file is not in your current path.

Answer 3

This happened to me when I ran ~/.wine && winecfg twice on Ubuntu 22 and no other answers including Elder Geek's one worked for me. Instead, I reinstalled wine from the source and it worked perfectly although it took ~30min to build.

sudo apt remove -y --purge wine wine-stable wine32 libwine wine64
git clone https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine
cd wine
git checkout stable
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt install -y gcc-multilib g++-multilib flex bison libx11-dev:i386 libx11-dev:i386 libfreetype6-dev:i386
./configure
make -j4
sudo make install

To run 32bit apps use WINEPREFIX=~/.new32prefix WINEARCH="win32" winecfg or WINEPREFIX=~/.new32prefix WINEARCH="win32" wine app.exe.

Answer 4

Run winecfg and ensure you have / and ../drive_c mounted in the Drives tab.

Answer 5

Related to this issue> This is regarding a wine bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39403 described in this link https://www.reddit.com/r/wine_gaming/comments/3vuuu9/steam_store_cant_connect_giving_me_black_screen/ . I want to show installing wine/windows steam games from The Linux Terminal is possible despite the black screen.This allows them to appear in your steam games Library.

There is one problem that must be fixed first and is shown is my work/ research:

In terminal issue:

wine steam.exe

you get this: wine: cannot find L"C:\windows\system32\steam.exe"

Wine wants any windows executable programs to be installed there for some reason. In my case steam.exe

Solution:

wine start /d "C:\nameoffoldercontainingexecutable" example.exe

For example:

steamsetup.exe is installed in C:\Program Files where i like it to be.

Therefore the magic key to issue a command for installing any windows game from the Linux terminal in wine steam is:

wine start /d "C:\Program Files\steamfoldername" steam.exe -applaunch steamappID#

The steam app ID is found in the URL of the steam game's web page.

wine start /d - Sets the working directory for the executable.

I apologise for combining multiple subjects but to me this is my first post to help others and this is a complicated issue but I hope my idea can be used effectively in a post.

Thank you

NOTE For some very rediculous reason when i finish editing this post the windows command line bars shows only 1 \ at a time. They should have 2 for each typed. I can't explain this otherwise.