wineserver is normally launched automatically when starting wine(1), so you shouldn't have to worry about it. In some cases however, it can be useful to start wineserver explicitly with different options, as explained below.

-d[n]

Set the debug level to n. 0 means no debugging information, 1 is the normal level, and 2 is for extra verbose debugging. If n is not specified, the default is 1. The debug output will be sent to stderr. wine(1) will automatically set the debug level when starting wineserver if the +server option is set in the WINEDEBUG variable.

-f

Make the server remain in the foreground for easier debugging, for instance when running it under a debugger.

-h

Display a help message.

-k[n]

Kill the currently running wineserver, optionally by sending signal n. If no signal is specified, sends a SIGINT first and then a SIGKILL. The instance of wineserver that is killed is selected based on the WINEPREFIX environment variable.

-p[n]

Specify the wineserver persistence delay, i.e. the amount of time that the server will keep running when all client processes have terminated. This avoids the cost of shutting down and starting again when programs are launched in quick succession. The timeout n is in seconds, the default value is 3 seconds. If n is not specified, the server stays around forever.

-v

Display version information and exit.

-w

Wait until the currently running wineserver terminates.

WINEPREFIX

If set, the content of this variable is taken as the name of the directory where wineserver stores its data (the default is $HOME/.wine). All wine processes using the same wineserver (i.e.: same user) share certain things like registry, shared memory and kernel objects. By setting WINEPREFIX to different values for different Wine processes, it is possible to run a number of truly independent Wine sessions.

WINESERVER

Specifies the path and name of the wineserver binary that will be launched automatically by wine. If not set, wine will try to load /usr/bin/wineserver, and if this doesn't exist it will then look for a file named wineserver in the path and in a few other likely locations.

~/.wine

Directory containing user specific data managed by wine.

/tmp/.wine-uid

The directory containing the server Unix socket and the lock file. These files are created in a subdirectory generated from the WINEPREFIX directory device and inode numbers.