W.ine I.s N.ot E.asy? Or is it?

July 25, 2007 11:33 AM

Help me learn about WINE (on linux, not in bottles).

Beginning to need to have uses for WINE.
Don't have time/inclination to just figure it out all by myself.
Is there a FM I can R?

Those in the know, Pretty Please recommend any books, websites, blogs, etc. you have used to learn WINE, and/or tips & tricks you'd care to pass on.

If it matters, we're running Ubuntu (debian) w/GNOME - Dapper & Edgy.

posted by bartleby to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Wine is actually surprisingly easy. After you apt-get install wine, run 'wine' and you get ~/.wine/drive_c which corresponds to the C:\ drive on windows. Download programs into there and run them as command line parameters to wine - eg:

~/.wine/drive_c:$ wine setup.exe

It's getting to be very mature and most of the time, that will do the trick, even for large pieces of software like World of Warcraft (note - you don't need to copy files to the drive_c directory, but it just allows you to later do something like 'wine c:/setup.exe'). If I remember correctly, wine sees your / as Z:.

The best site I can recommend for using wine is http://appdb.winehq.org , which contains a database of many windows applications and how well they work on wine (as well as step by step instructions for workarounds, if needed)

http://frankscorner.org/ is also quite good (it serves a similar purpose) but as far as I know, Wine's appdb is most frequently updated.
posted by mebibyte at 11:40 AM on July 25, 2007

This does not precisely answer your question, but I recommend Codeweavers' CrossOver highly.

Under Debian Woody, it was a great hassle-free way to get a fully working WINE install.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 12:31 PM on July 25, 2007

I have not used Wine-doors, but it sounds pretty cool. It looks like a sort of package repository for things that are freely available and install through wine.
posted by adamwolf at 3:01 PM on July 25, 2007