Need advice on wine setup

[s003apr]

I'm installing and setting up wine for the first time and need some
advice from others.

I have read the wine documentation over and I am still unsure of
whether to have wine use my windows partition, or setup it's own
partition on my linux drive.

Currently, I have WindowsXP installed on a vfat partition. The
documentation states that it can be setup to use the windows
partition, however this can be dangerous and can end up screwing up
your windows partition. The advantage to this is that you use the
windows true dll files which will perform better.

The alternative is to setup a fake windows environment on my linux
drives using Wine's dll files which may not function as well, however
this will keep me from screwing up windows.

I guess the third option is that I copy a windows partition somewhere
into my linux system, that way I can use my windows dlls yet not screw
up my windows partitions.

Can anybody comment on how dangerous the different options are? Maybe
give me an idea of how you setup your systems and why?
Also, if I go with the third option, is there a particular version of
windows (98 or XP) which works best with Wine?

[BonezTheGoon]

Well I highly recommend something that would qualify as the fourth option (which is really a mix of the third option and the second option). Basically it involves using the default fake windows from Wine and then only copy over the specific dlls you need for a specific application (there are many threads regarding these kinds of issues if you are interested in reading them.) You are correct in thinking that there is a version of windows that is most compatible with Wine, and it seems to be Win98SE (at least in my experience anyway.) So try to get the DLL's for Win98 when you need native files to get the job done right. Also I recommend only using native dlls for just the app you must (you can set this up in your wine config easily.) So in short, certainly leave your true WinXP partition far away from Wine, especially since it is WinXP anyhow. The odds are high anyway that your WinXP partition is NTFS which linux really isn't very good at handling yet, reliably--although it is possible your WinXP is using Fat32 (if it is you might consider upgrading it to the NTFS system which is more robust and has journaling.) I hope that answers your question, let me know if I didn't or if I sparked some new ones.

Regards,
BonezTheGoon