WINE: The Open Source Way to Run Windows Applications

Marcel Gagné

I usually recommend Linux when discussing alternative operating systems, and I’ve found that many people are open to the concept but they continue to run at least some Windows applications. How can you have the best of both Linux and Microsoft worlds? Dual booting is an option, but having to boot from Linux to Windows and back simply to run a single program seems counterintuitive at best. Luckily, there are other options.

VMWare and Win4Lin are well-known products that allow you to run Microsoft Windows programs on your system, but they also require a full, licensed version of Windows to achieve that end. While either of these alternatives provides an excellent means of running Windows applications on Linux, neither lets you circumvent Windows.

WINE, which stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator”, is different in that it does not require a copy of Microsoft Windows in order to run programs, thus saving the cost of a license. WINE provides a complete rewrite of the Win32 APIs that contains no Microsoft code. Don’t think of it as Windows, but rather a productivity layer that lets you run some Windows applications. Furthermore, WINE is open source and freely distributed, so the price can’t be beat. Keep in mind that WINE is designed for X86 architectures, which means that you can compile it on your Intel box running Linux, FreeBSD, or even Solaris. However, Solaris SPARC workstations, having different hardware architecture, will not work.

If you would like to try WINE, you can get the latest sources from the WINE headquarters at http://www.winehq.com. Building from source may not be necessary. The site has links to daily builds in many different formats. Should you wish to obtain the source and build for yourself, you’ll find that it is pretty straightforward:

gunzip Wine-20010824.t