Wine is Windows Emulation. It lets you run most windows programs in Linux. The important thing to remember is that there are better programs in Linux than in windows. But if you have to keep a windows program after you install Linux, Wine can let you keep running some of your old windows programs.
WINE is a recursive acronym that stands for: WINE Is Not an Emulator. WINE is an alternative (Linux native) implementation of the Windows APIs. While there may be very little functional difference from the end-user's view-point, there are significant technical differences between an emulator and a native API implementation.
~Bradley
Billy Crook wrote:
Wine is Windows Emulation. It lets you run most windows programs in Linux. The important thing to remember is that there are better programs in Linux than in windows. But if you have to keep a windows program after you install Linux, Wine can let you keep running some of your old windows programs. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Wednesday 09 May 2007 10:34, Billy Crook wrote:
Wine is Windows Emulation.
WINE = WINE Is *Not* an Emulator
It lets you run most windows programs in Linux.
But not via emulation. WINE implements the Win32 APIs on top of an X11/POSIX system. As a result, programs run natively and sometimes even faster than on a Windows OS. For example, WINE provides gdi32.dll.so, a native shared library that implements the functions provided by Windows's gdi32.dll. The "wine" binary merely does 3 simple things: 1. reads the PE executable format and loads the code into memory (this *could* be done by Linux, just like it reads ELF/a.out formats) 2. loads the dynamicly linked .so libraries based on the PE (equivalent of ld.so?) 3. Executes the newly loaded program and, if not running, some daemons (which handle things like Win32 IPC; in theory, this case could be replaced with dbus wrappers).
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Billy Crook -
Bradley Hook -
Luke -Jr