Get windows programs running on your linux box (WINE)

Member Name: xcorlett

Product:	WINE
Date:	19/03/09 (73 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Incredible amounts of work have gone into it and it shows

Disadvantages: Still very far to go - buggy, fixing it is tedius

If you have been running Linux for a while, you have probably heard of Wine. It is a compatibility layer for Windows programs, allowing software written for Windows to be executed under Linux (other other unix based operating systems) at almost the same speed. In some cases it actually runs faster, presumably because you don't have Windows bloat to deal with while running your application.

How does it work? Well, it translates calls from Windows software into something that can be understood in Linux terms. In some cases, this is a very complicated operation and it can break down easily. It all depends on whether the particular procedure that the program is attempting to call has been translated and implemented yet. A very large number of programs are certified to work "out-of-the-box" with the latest versions of wine. It is a free, open-source application that is being improved upon by the community. If you have any skills, you can join in.

What are its limitations? It has many. Most programs do not work out-of-the-box, and require tweaking. If you need to run a complex program AND have a copy of windows, I would recommend using Sun's free VirtualBox application. This will allow you to install Windows under your OS and run it like any other application. It works extremely well, except that it cannot handle 3d graphics particularly well or at all in most cases. For games, I'd stick with wine and refer to the list of games that work best with it. I play GTA San Andreas under wine and it runs perfectly, except for not being able to turn the graphics settings all the way up.

Wine gives you an imitation hard drive for storing your "windows" files, and the ability to edit its fake regedit so that you can tweak settings.

For the most part, it isn't rocket science to use, but as soon as you encounter problems you should either give up immediately or be prepared to spend several hours configuring and being confused. I gave it 5 starts because it is an excellent application considering the size of the task that it is trying to complete.

Summary: Excellent application

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