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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Bordeaux for OpenSolaris 1.8.2 Released

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris 1.8.2 was released with support for Microsoft Office 97, 2000, 2003, Visio 2003, Project 2003, Internet Explorer 6, Adobe Image Ready 3, Adobe Photoshop 7, Adobe Image Ready 3, QuickTime Player 6.5.2 and IrfanView 4.25 (Image support only at this time). There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliablity of all the supported applications.

Supported Applications/Games:

• Microsoft Office 2003
• Microsoft Office 2000
• Microsoft Office 97
• Microsoft Office Visio 2003
• Microsoft Office Project 2003
• Adobe Photoshop 6
• Adobe Image Ready 3
• Adobe Photoshop 7
• Adobe Image Ready 7
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
• Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player
• IrfanView 4.25 (Image files only)
• Winetricks support

Version 1.8.2 New Features:

• Added QuickTime 6.5.2 Player support
• Added IrfanView 4.25 support
• Bundle cabextract, wget and unzip support

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Apple QuickTime 6.5.2 Player with Bordeaux

IrfanView 4.25 with Bordeaux

Steam on OpenSolaris with Bordeaux

MegaTux to run 1 million copies on Wine to simulate the Internet

The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., are creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of rogue programs known as botnets.


Botnets are used extensively by malicious computer hackers to steal computing power from Internet-connected computers. The hackers harness the stolen resources into a scattered but powerful computer that can be used to send spam, execute phishing scams or steal digital information. These remote-controlled “distributed computers” are difficult to observe and track.
Botnets may take over parts of tens of thousands or in some cases even millions of computers, making them among the world’s most powerful computers for some applications.
“When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyberattack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,” said Ron Minnich, a Sandia scientist who specializes in computer security. “It’s an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.”

To stalk the botnets, Mr. Minnich and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers.
The researchers said they hoped to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet in October and then gather data on how the system behaves. One of the challenges will be in tricking the botnet components into believing they are running in the open Internet.
Some botnet makers have designed their programs to detect so-called honey pots, programs that pretend to be computers that can be taken over but which instead are used to capture and observe botnet clients.

Typically, supercomputers have been designed with the goal of reaching absolute computing performance, and used for complex scientific or engineering tasks like modeling the earth’s climate, protein folding or simulating nuclear weapons explosions.
The Sandia computer, which the researchers have named MegaTux, in a reference to Tux, the penguin character that is the official mascot of the Linux operating system, is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. For example, Microsoft researchers have created a vast visualization database they call the world wide telescope.

“One of the advantages of such a system is that we can stop the simulation at any point and look for patterns,” Mr. Rudish said. “It’s one of the neat things you can do when you crash a simulation of a 747 on a supercomputer.”
In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems.

The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer used for the Sandia project has 4,480 Intel microprocessors, far fewer than the million operating systems the researchers sought to simulate. But they used “virtual machine” software technology to get each microprocessor to simultaneously run many instances of a Linux-based component called a kernel — a basic component of an operating system that manages communications between software and hardware.

Because most botnets are written for the Windows operating system, the researchers are planning to use an open source program called Wine, making it possible to run Windows-based programs without actually having the complete Windows operating system. They said they were not using Windows itself because of the licensing costs of purchasing one million copies of Windows.

Besides simulating the Internet, Keith Vanderveen, manager of scaleable computing research at Sandia, said the system would be valuable for exploring the design of future supercomputers that might have millions rather than thousands of processors. It will also be invaluable for researchers who are hoping to design new, more secure protocols for the Internet.