A Taste of Wine

What I most often hear as the reason for not switching to Linux is the perceived inability to run Windows programs. People have shelled out lots of hard-earned cash and sweat equity in purchasing and learning their Windows applications. They’re just not quite ready to leave those sacrifices behind and make the leap to Linux. It’s a completely understandable rationale. Though it’s not yet perfect, the Wine program is becoming a more reasonable alternative each day.

Many think of Wine as a Windows emulator. The developers prefer to call it a windows compatibility layer. Wine is intended to bridge the gap between Linux programs and Windows programs that prevent so many from using Linux as their primary OS. In other words, Wine is designed to allow Linux users to run Windows programs within the Linux environment.

Wine has been in development for several years. Currently, Wine supports a broad range of Win32 applications - 764 are currently listed in the database. These include Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, the Microsoft Office suite, Quicken, and QuickBooks Pro. The database also lists games, utilities and other special purpose Win32 apps that are operable within Wine.

Though significant strides have been made in the Codeweavers versions of Wine, installation and configuration is still not for the meek. To their credit, the authors have posted an extensive set of instructions and user manuals, intended to help ease the pain of installing and configuring Wine.

If you’re looking for an increasingly viable solution for running your hard-earned Windows apps in Linux, Wine is the answer. You can download the installable rpm here.