Written by Tom Wickline

Sunday, 13 July 2008 23:04

I was browsing around today and came across a nice article titled (WINE Whine WINE) here is a snip from the original article.

I use WINE on an almost daily basis to run Windows binaries right in my Linux environment. It is a requirement of my job, and virtual machines such as VMWare (or here), VirtualBox, etc. just seemed like overkill.

However, I was recently surprised to discover that many people are not familiar with WINE, what it does, or how easy it can be to make it do it. That, coupled with the recent post-beta, stable release of WINE itself, pushed me to help get the word out.

So, let’s start with a couple of questions:

What is WINE?

The answer from the WINE website is:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.

OK - so what does that mean? It means that for a good number of Windows applications, you can simply get the EXE file (or COM, or accompanying DLLs) on your Linux-based computer and run them right in Linux. That’s right - no rebooting your dual-boot system, no starting a virtual machine - just run it and have it integrated into your Linux/Ubuntu desktop environment. Slick…

Why is it called WINE?

WINE is a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It refers specifically to the fact that WINE is not intended to emulate a machine running a full install of Windows. Instead, it is a rewrite of the native Windows API in an open-source format, without reliance on Windows native (and proprietary) code. The whole idea is that Windows (like most operating systems) relies on calls to an underlying library of system calls. If you know the system calls and what they are expected to do, you can easily (well, not so easily in practice) create libraries for any operating system or platform by simply accepting the same inputs (function parameters) and performing the appropriate operations to produce the expected output.

Enough with the techno-mumbo-jumbo. What do I need to do to run a Windows application on my Ubuntu box?

Well, the answer is, that depends. Ubuntu has long had packaged support for WINE (search for it in Synaptic) but as of this writing, it had not yet picked up version 1.0 (I’ve got 0.9.59 visible in my standard hardy repo currently). However, the fine folks at WINEHq have provided packages that are easily used, all you need to do it point your sources there.

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