Chapter 17. Necessary Evils: Running MS Windows Programs

Difficult-o-Meter: 4 ( fairly high Linux knowledge required)

Covers:

wine	http://www.winehq.com

Question: How can I run MS Windows programs from Linux?

Answer: Use Wine.

Repeat after me: Wine is not an emulator (WINE). It's not, really. Emulators well, emulate different hardware. Wine runs Windows programs in the Linux environment, but the hardware is all the same ”Intel x86. As such, it's really a program loader and a massively reverse-engineered shared library system. If none of that makes sense to you, just remember this: Wine lets you run your MS Windows programs under Linux.

Wine is probably the most ambitious Linux-based project since Linux itself, and it's done by a set of developers who have recognized that alternative software sometimes just doesn't cut it. Sometimes, one simply must run MS Windows software to accomplish a given task. This is particularly true of games .

Wine is aiming at a moving target ”it's attempting to emulate all of MS Windows, in all versions, simultaneously . Amazingly enough, it's actually managing to do this. Not everything is perfect, that's for sure. There are font-size problems in certain windows. Some applications will cause your instance of X-windows to crash. Some games will hard-hang your entire machine (it sounds like a perfect copy of certain MS Windows behaviors, doesn't it?). DirectX support is still spotty, and graphics under X are slower than under MS Windows. But for the most part, it's functional.

Bear in mind that Wine is still technically a developer-only release. This means that documentation is often either sparse or outdated , sometimes both. Sometimes new releases of Wine will not run applications that worked fine under previous versions (though this is happening less and less). It's not terribly space-optimized yet. You'll want to have 300MB of space free on your hard drive to compile and install Wine. As of the more recent versions, you no longer need to have an MS Windows installation at all! Wine can load and run programs directly from the ext2 file system. Support for installer programs has come a long way, so the installer can be run through Wine, and all the registry entries will be properly installed.

Applications run with different degrees of success, depending on whether or not your system has a real copy of MS Windows installed somewhere. The authors all run varying setups and have experienced some minor differences in how applications run. We've noticed that this occurs both ways, in fact ”sometimes, having MS Windows negatively affects how an application runs, and sometimes it nets a positive effect. As always, your mileage may vary.