Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Installing and Using Wine

And then there’s Wine (www.winehq.org), a complete rebuild of Microsoft Windows functionality that runs under Linux. Wine is in many ways the mother of everything in the previous section. However, because it’s a free and very complicated project, it’s not quite as friendly as the commercial versions. It’s kind of like the others but with all the makeup and hairspray removed.

You can install Wine by using the information in Chapter 16. You will find that there are many packages that start with “wine.” Install wine, wine-cms, wine-core, wine-docs, and wine-tools (or install all of them if you have lots of space and don’t want to take any chances).

You can find the Wine documentation at www.winehq.org/site/docs/wineusr-guide/index. Start in the “Configuring Wine” section. When installed, you can find the Wine tools in ApplicationsWine.

When you have Wine installed, you get to the fun part — trying to run your old Windows software. You don’t really run Wine, per se. Instead, you invoke Wine whenever you need to use something from the Windows world. To install a Windows program through Wine, insert the CD-ROM or floppy into the appropriate drive. Your distribution might open the File Manager for you, or you may need to open the File Manager manually. Regardless, ...