ITinfo: Run Windows Apps For Free on Linux

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Linux & Wine

Run Windows applications without Windows

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Run Windows Apps For Free on Linux

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

The other day I was tinkering on one of my Linux workstation and I figured I'd see how hard it would be to run Windows applications on Linux. I was ready to do some heavy research, but it took less than 10 minutes before I had my first Windows app up and running. And surprisingly, on a 500MHz PC with only 128MB of RAM the applications ran faster than on my 900MHz Win2000 system that has half a gigabyte of RAM.

I downloaded the Wine program from the net and I had full Windows compatibility layer running on my Red Hat Linux. In layman's terms, Wine creates an environment that emulates all versions of Microsoft Windows. Running a Windows app on a Linux system is as simple as typing the word wine before the executable filename. For example, to install an application, I typed "wine setup," to then run the application, "wine winword." Just like creating icons in Microsoft Windows, Linux makes it a snap to create icons that execute the "wine [app]" commands.

Wine also allows the emulation of each version of Microsoft Windows with the option "wine --win95 [app]," "wine --win98 [app]," or "wine --win2000 [app]."

Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. Wine comes with complete sources, documentation and examples and is freely distributable, even for commercial use. That's right, it's free.

Wine isn't without its drawbacks, however. It's not as polished as users who know only Windows applications would expect. But for hackers with a Linux box, it's a simple alternative for running Windows applications.

After chatting this up over the weekend, I was asked if Linux and Wine could be an alternative to Windows for home users. Not yet; I think many end users would find it over their head. Getting some of Microsoft's applications running was a trick -- Microsoft's apps seem to be more complicated than other vendors' software. I found lots of help in the online documentation, but I had to RTFM.

If you want to give it a try, I suggest you pick up a copy of Red Hat Linux for about $19 in the store. Or, if you've got a CD burner, download the ISO files from Red Hat's site. Then download Wine. Total install time on a new drive (not including downloads and burning) is about an hour.

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References

Wine Development HQ
Red Hat
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http://itrain.org/itinfo/2001/it010530.html
updated May 30, 2001