Macs And Windows

As a confirmed Mac-head, I have always bemoaned the fact that there has not, until recently, been enough interest shown in making applications usable for the Mac. Well, that has changed for several reasons. First, the Mac is now using the Intel chip, which is the same as in PC's. This means virtual Windows software is much easier and faster running on Macs. Second, Apple has the benefit of "cool," what with iPods, iPhones, and all sorts of other neat products, like their wafer-thin and light MacBook Air, so more people are buying them. Finally, the sheer power of the latest Mac's and their own native Boot Camp allows virtual Windows to run on the machines with little drop off in performance.

Even better is not having to purchase Windows in the first place. Wine, which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, was first designed for Linux. As the the web site says, "Rather than acting as a full emulator, Wine implements a compatibility layer, providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and processes to substitute for the Windows NT kernel." However it works, if you are good at programming, you can implement Wine for free. However, a company called Codeweavers is compiling a database of Windows programs that will run under the Mac Wine interface, so that Mac owners can use their computers at work without switching. As a Codeweaver advocate, I try to get my chosen Windows programs to run under CrossOver, the Wine program from Codeweavers. So far I am batting about .500, which is not too bad. It is great when a program to which you were denied due to your computer choice suddenly works.

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Wine Is a Long Shot at Solving the Windows Apps on Linux Problem

The open-source Wine project is less a solution and more a workaround when it comes to the issue of running Windows applications on Linux.

After devoting my last couple of columns to the topic of choosing an alternate OS (in particular, Linux) without giving up your Windows apps, I didn't plan on extending the discussion further—that is, until a lively reader exchange prompted me to turn that pair of columns into a trio.

If we're to discuss Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, how can we forget about Wine, the open-source project devoted to building a sort of shim between the APIs that Windows applications require and the equivalents of those interfaces on a Linux machine?

I've been keeping tabs on Wine for as long as I've been following Linux, and my exclusion of Wine was less about having forgotten about it than about having set it aside—at best as a “maybe someday” solution and at worst as an altogether lost cause. For a time, I hoped that Wine would be the answer to the Linux apps chicken-and-egg problem. However, things never quite worked out that way.

First off, many (it's probably safe to say most) Windows apps don't run under Wine at all. For instance, neither of the two Windows-bound applications that I miss the most as a Linux user—iTunes and the VMware vSphere client—works under Wine. In the case of iTunes, Wine lacks USB support, so there's no way to use it to communicate with my iPod Touch. The vSphere client relies on Version 3 of Microsoft's .NET framework, which Wine does not

What's more, even when it is possible to get your Windows apps running on Wine, various tweaks are often required to get there. For instance, while getting reacquainted with Wine to write this column, I found that the Windows apps I tried to run appeared on my desktop with jagged-looking fonts. I managed to enable font anti-aliasing to address the issue, but only after fiddling around in the registry of my Wine installation.

Once you've gotten an application running, the next set of system updates you apply—whether to your Linux machine, to the Windows app in question or to Wine itself—could well sour your installation, requiring still more tweaking and forum searching.

For certain popular applications, you can save yourself some of this hassle by purchasing a Wine distribution such as Codeweavers CrossOver product as a way of outsourcing some of that tweaking and searching work. But if you need support from your application's vendor, I imagine you'll have a tough time finding Wine in any supported configurations matrix.

For all these reasons, I can't see Wine serving as a reliable option for addressing the Windows-apps-on-Linux problem. Rather, it's a workaround, something to keep in mind and try if you're in a pinch, but not something to count on.

Now, if, as the reader I discussed this with suggested, all the big Linux vendors got together and invested in Wine, I don't doubt that they could improve the project a great deal.

According to the project's bug tracker, some work toward USB support is under way, and versions of the .NET Framework earlier than the one I need for the vSphere client are reported to work.

However, these vendors have reacted toward Wine with unambiguous ambivalence for going on 10 years now. Considering how slow the projects and companies that drive Linux have been to seize on and integrate the largely Linux-powered apps of the Web into first-class citizens of their desktop distributions, it's tough to imagine them working hard to enlarge the application base for Windows.

Run Kindle for PC in Linux with WINE

Reader Gene told us that Kindle for PC is "more important than people realize." That's because the desktop app runs almost seamlessly in Linux with one WINE tweak, making Kindle a great little laptop or netbook reading option.
To install Kindle for PC on your Linux system, make sure you've got WINE installed. Most major distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE) offer WINE in one of their repositories, or have versions custom-made for them.
With WINE installed, download the Kindle for PC installer, then double-click on the .exe file you downloaded. WINE will pick it up and install it in its virtual C:/ drive. The one issue you'll encounter is that Kindle will automatically start up and ask you for your username and password, even though you can't see the fields; you can quit the app and fix that, or just type in your username, hit Tab, then your password, and then quit.

Head to your system's menu and then to the WINE folder, and hit "Configure WINE"—if you don't see it, just run winecfg from a terminal or Alt+F2 prompt. In the "Applications" tab, hit "Add Application," then navigate to Kindle for PC in your virtual Windows drive, which is at C:\Program Files\Amazon\Kindle for PC\KindleForPC.exe by default. Hit OK, select KindleForPC.exe back in the Wine configuration window, and change the "Windows Version" drop-down at the bottom to Windows 98. Head back to your WINE menu, run Kindle for PC, and now all your controls and buttons should be showing up correctly.

You can now send books and sample chapters from Amazon's Kindle store to your PC. If you've already installed Kindle for PC in a Windows machine and tied it to your account, be sure to send your Kindle items to your Linux-based reader (which was "Kindle for PC 2" in my case).

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Running World of Warcraft in Ubuntu Linux

World of Warcraft runs well in Ubuntu.

If you are looking for an operating system that offers the best values, none can compare to Linux.
First of all, it's free. Most Linux distributions can be downloaded gratis from the developers' Web site and you can install it on however many computers you want. Secondly, it comes with a lot of things, such as office tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation), audio and video playback, Internet and e-mail, instant messaging, and so on. Basically everything a general user would want to use with a computer is there when the installation is done. For those applications that are not there, chances are you can download them for free.

Wine is more than just an emulator; it makes Windows applications run in Linux much like they do in Windows.

There's also a Linux application called Wine that allows you to run Windows software within Linux. What is special about Wine, however, is the fact that it's not a traditional virtual environment and therefore runs Windows applications very much the way Windows does, without much overhead. Unfortunately, not all Windows applications work with Wine and even if they do, you might not be able to install or run them the way you do in Windows.

Wine, which was developed in 1993, is a recursive acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator," though this doesn't make it true that it is not an emulator. Rather than acting as a full emulator, it implements a compatibility layer, providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and processes to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. The Wine project has run into a lot of difficulties, mostly because of the incomplete and incorrect documentation of the Windows API. For this reason, after 15 years of development, the first version of Wine (1.0) was release in mid-2008.
Over my Christmas break, I decided to try out the latest version of Wine with my most frequently used Windows application, which is called World of Warcraft (or WoW). Just so that it's clear that I am not antisocial, this didn't take away much time spending with friends and family, as it actually took me less than an hour to do the whole thing.

I started out with getting an ISO image of the ever-popular Linux distro Ubuntu version 9.10. After that, I burned the image onto a CD and started the installation from it.

If you have ever installed an operating system, such as Windows, the installation of Ubuntu is very similar to that. You just need to insert the CD into the optical drive, boot the computer from it, and follow the instructions. The installer will do everything for you, including configuring the hard drive and setting up dual-boot if you want to use it on the same computer that also has Windows installed. In this case, make sure you pick the amount of hard-drive space you want to use for Linux carefully, as this can't be changed once the new OS is installed.

You need to launch the Windows executable file using Wine Windows Program Loader to run a Windows-based application within Linux.

Note that in case there's no free space on the hard drive, the Linux installer will automatically shrink the partition used by Windows and free some space for Linux. This process, apart from making the Windows partition smaller, doesn't change anything else and your Windows should work like normal. However, a good rule of thumb is to make sure you back up important files prior to installing Linux.
In my case, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on the same Core 2 Dual machine with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive that runs Windows 7 into a dual-boot setup and the whole process took less than 30 minutes. After that, at boot up, I have the option of booting in either Windows 7 or Ubuntu.
Once the installation is done, though Ubuntu runs fine, chances are not all the hardware components, such as video or sound, have their optimized drivers installed. You need to manually do this by running the Hardware Driver utility (System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers); this utility will list the hardware components that require proprietary drivers and you just need to install (or activate) them. In my case, I needed to do that for my video card, which is a budget Geforce 8300GS with 510MB of RAM.

Wine can be installed for free and the process takes just less than a minute via a broadband connection.

The next step is to install Wine. You can do that via Ubuntu Software Center (Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center). Here, you select "Get Free Software" then search for "Wine." In my case, I found two versions of Wine: Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layers and Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layers (Beta Release). I picked the beta release. (Obviously newer is better, right?) The installation of Wine literally took a few seconds with the Internet connection I used, which was really fast. If you use a regular DSL, this might take around a minute.
Now it's time to install WoW. I did it the way I've always done in Windows in the last couple of years: copying the whole "World of Warcraft" folder over from another computer. This is because installing the game from scratch would take hours, considering all the updates and the almost 20GB of storage space that the game requires. With Linux, however, you might not be able to install WoW from scratch anyway. The WoW installer that I tried refused to continue, citing that the computer doesn't meet the game's requirement. This is probably because it could read the computer's hardware via Wine.

Because WoW wasn't installed from scratch, I couldn't launch it from Wine's Start Menu (which resembles that of Windows'). Instead, I need to call the game's executable directly. The trick is that you need to call it via Wine Windows Program Loader by right clicking on the Wow.exe file and choose "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader." It won't work if you just double-click on it.

And that's it, the game loaded and worked just like in Windows. I could run it in full-screen mode, Windows mode, using the add-ons, etc. The performance was decent. At the recommenced settings, I had consistently 20 frames per second in Daralan, the notoriously slow and laggy area of the game. In other areas, such as dungeons, I was able to get up to 45fps, which was really impressive considering the budget video card.

Overall, it was a really interesting and exciting experience. However, WoW crashed during start-up a couple times; this could be solved by simply restarting the computer or reinstalling Wine. This is probably where the "beta" notion of Wine is to blame.

Other than WoW, I tried a few other Windows applications, such as iTunes and QuickTime, and they worked, too. however they didn't always work the way you expect in Windows.

All in all, Wine will not make an alternative to Windows, but the fact that now I can run my favorite game in Linux makes me believe that Linux is really an ideal operating system for savvy users. So if you think you are one, make a backup of your Windows computer and try it out. It's a lot of fun and doesn't cost anything.

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WineBottler for OS X

Mac only: Wine has always been popular among Linux users for running Windows programs, but Wine is available for Mac, too and now, free utility WineBottler can "bottle" Windows programs into separate application bundles that run as standalone Mac apps.

To use WineBottler, just download a Windows EXE, then drag and drop it onto the WineBottler app. You can install them in a fake C: drive located by default in your home folder, just as you would on Linux, and run them from there easily. However, if you want to create a standalone application bundle (so that you can give a Windows program to a fellow Mac user, for example), WineBottler will create a separate bundle with Wine included inside, so your friend doesn't have to have Wine installed the app acts just like any other OS X app.

Note that just like in Linux, not all Windows programs work in Wine so you'll have to see for yourself if the program you want to convert is compatible. Notepad++ Portable, in the screenshot below, worked great.)

WineBottler is a free download, Mac OS X only.

WineBottler

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