Do you have binfmt-support installed?

Maybe you could rephrase the message to say: “It’s the first time you start the Windows program XXXX. Do you want to give it the permissions to run?” Explaining why you ask (it’s the first time) maybe make it a little more legitimate.

And you must know that since 2.26 running a .desktop file that has no x bit set prompts a dialog too. I think you should harmonize the designs, only changing the type of the program, and that would help for all executables around here. good luck!

However, I think we can minimize users learning to ignore the dialog by minimizing the amount of times they see it. If you download the .exe in firefox, for instance, we can have Firefox do the same thing it does in Windows when you download an executable, and if the user clicks through that, then firefox can mark it +x for them.

Wine is also already configured to mark +x any executable that it creates itself. So when you run foo-installer, get through the dialog, and then you try to run foo itself, you won’t see the dialog a second time.

JohnCC: shared-mime-info should be able to tell apart mono binaries and win32 binaries.

First off, in this case it is easy to accidentally uncheck, then launch the app + from then on things will launch no questions asked. So for me the check box needs some confirmation behind, to confirm you really did mean to change the value.

The other thing that bugs me about dialogs like this is that once you have switched them off it is rarely obvious how to switch them on again. This is the bit I don’t have a good answer too.

Finally, agree with Joseph Booker, dialogs like this really don’t help a lot. If the user encounters the thing often enough they get used to clicking without thinking. If they aren’t encountering the dialog often, then it is useful, but then in that case it is a rare enough event that a bit of extra trouble to run the app is probably not a big deal.

You would need to go through a similar process to what you just did here to know how to word it right, but it seems to be a slightly better fit for the unix style permissions.

Even files that are not expected to be executables will not be helped by this if the user is trained to press the launch button by habit, especially if they don’t even care to read what the dialog is saying to begin with.

Is making programs say “DANGER! If you do this, I didn’t tell you to, even though you need to in order to to use the programs you want, you can’t blame me if things go bad” really good usability?

I mean, if malware is a problem, why not have wine depend on clamav and have the gui launchers run a scan? or show a warning if the file matches /\.[a-z]*\.exe/i ?