TAG | Run Window apps on Linux? It just takes a drop of mature wine |
|
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 19 June 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 3 Wine, simply put, facilitates running Microsoft Windows applications within Linux. The programs will display in their own windows just as if they were native Linux applications. If you’ve ever worked with a virtual PC or a machine emulator – like emulators for the humble Commodore 64 or other 8-bit machines, even Gameboy emulators – then you may have in mind an environment which is launched, and then software – be they games or applications or anything else – is loaded within that environment. In these situations, you will invariably have issues moving files between your native file system and that within the emulated environment. You will have issues transferring the clipboard. However, Wine is not like that. It doesn’t launch any closed environment. The software which Wine enables will behave like any regular natural Linux application. The wine developers are keen to highlight this point and in the past touted that the name “Wine” was a self-recursive acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator.” Mind you, that’s a bit of semantic trickery; really, Wine is emulating something – the way it achieves its magic is by emulating the Windows application program interfaces (APIs.) These APIs are much of the reason why Windows programs work. Let me clarify: computer programs contain instructions to perform calculations, move memory around, evaluate conditions, loop over a piece of code, branch to different pieces of code instead of continuing to execute sequential instructions and so on. However, to actually draw buttons on the screen, to respond to how the mouse has moved, to write a file to disk or many, many other highly useful, important and just plain expected things, the program must call routines which are provided by the operating system. These are the APIs. And these are the reason why a button in, say, Microsoft Excel looks like a button in, say, MYOB: both programs call on the operating system’s APIs to do these regular and essential things. So, the approach by Wine was not to try and build a fictionalised computer but to provide a means that let programs run just as they come, firing off calls to APIs whenever they want and actually having them hit something that provides a result as expected. How successful is this approach? And if you’ve used Wine previously, what’s new? CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
