Running Linux, 5th Edition

Emulation and Virtual Operating Systems

The next step up from using Windows files within Linux shells and applications is to make Linux act like Windows so it can run Windows applications . In this section we discuss the two most popular ways to do this: Wine (along with CrossOver Office) and VMware.

Wine

Wine can get you out of a number of high-pressure situations, whether it's your friends bugging you to play the latest Half-Life 2 mod, or finding out after you converted your entire corporation to Linux that the CEO can't function without his favorite Access database.

Wine is a free software project that lets you run your favorite Windows programs on Linux. It does this by implementing Microsoft's Win32 application programming interface (only on Intel x86 systems).

The acronym Wine expands to "Wine Is Not an Emulator." Rather than emulating a Windows system, Wine translates between the Windows program and the underlying Linux system. You can think of Wine and its libraries as a piece of middleware that sits between your application and Linux (not unlike those other APIs we mentioned). However, no one will get angry if you call it an emulator because it sort of works like one.

Wine's roots can be traced back to 1993 and the earliest days of Linux. A group of developers thought it might be interesting to get Windows programs to run on Linux. At the time, Microsoft used the Win16 API in Windows 3.1. A newer operating system, Windows NT, was under intense development and was intended to ...