Well, I don't run seti, but I do run Folding@Home under wine.
I run the command line version, so I have my stuff configured to run at startup (using /etc/rc2.d/....), and I have it configured to
run as root.
Here's what I had to do....
(This is EXTREMELY quick and dirty, and YMMV).
Once I got a good wine configuration for a user, I did an su to root. If root does not have a ~/.wine directory, I copied the working user's directory to
root. Then I did a
'chown -R root:root .wine' to make everything owned by root. That gives root access to wine.
Then, go into .wine, and edit config.
Change any lines that have a reference to the user to be /root
Change the line that identifies the driver from
"GraphicsDriver" = "x11drv" to
"GraphicsDriver" = "ttydrv" This allows you to run console apps w/o needing the X session.
Now you should be able to run your seti stuff.
nice -19 wine -- setiathome -proxy <yoursetiqueue: port>