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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Running Windows Apps on Solaris with Bordeaux 1.8.2 and Wine

For what seems like forever using Wine (The Windows compatability layer) on Solaris was an absolute pain. There was once a time when you had to compile it by hand, then Vit Hrachovy & Apostolos Syropoulos and Albert Lee started producing SVR4 packages that made installing as easy as “pkgadd -d winepackage”.

Since then Brandon Barker has pushed the latest stable release of Wine into the contrib IPS repository which integrates well with the new software management architecture for OpenSolaris.

By itself Wine is very usable but you need a fair amount of expertise or lots of time to get your favourite Windows application running correctly. This is why we have companies like Bordeaux Group and CodeWeavers who sell commercially supported Wine version or management tools that make our lives a little easier.

To give you an idea of how easy it is I am just going to focus on how easy Bordeaux 1.8.2 makes it to get MS Office 2003 up and running.

Installing Bordeaux:

Once you have added the “contrib” repository to your OpenSolaris sytem by typing:
pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/ contrib
You can install Wine by simply typing
pfexec pkg install wine
This will pull in Wine and all the other packages that support it.
After doing this you can run the Bordeaux installer by typing:
./bordeaux-solaris.x86.sh
You should then be able to see the new Bordeaux sub-menu in your Applications Menu:

Installing MS Office

In the Bordeaux menu when you select “Install Windows Applications” you are presented with a list of supported Windows Applications, from here I selected Microsoft Office 2003. Bordeaux then goes and fetches all of the necessary supporting components (MSXML etc…) and installs them all for you, following that you are asked to point the installer at the installer exe for Microsoft Office which you may have on a DVD disk or stored on your drive. Once you select the installer you simply go through the normal installation process, entering your product key and so on.

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