gamegrene.com

Are you a Linux user? Hate rebooting just so you can play a game of Counterstrike or run some Windows-centric application to perform a simple task because the boneheads didn't port it to Linux? Well there's good news, WINE is here for you. What is WINE? Well, in the glorious tradition of recursive acronyms, WINE is: WINE Is Not an Emulator. It provides runtime support for many Win32 applications. It has been developed by primarily reverse engineering the Windows architecture and by using Microsoft's sketchy documentation of the Win32 API. Recently, Corel assisted greatly with WINE development and they are developing a method of porting Win32 apps to Linux by compiling them with WINElib. Many other vendors are contributing to WINE, including Transgaming who are working on integrating 100% compliant DirectX 7 support into WINE. Codeweavers has contributed a lot in many non-gaming related areas of WINE as well.

Installing WINE is fairly simple. Go to www.winehq.com and download the source tarball. It uses the standard install process of "./configure && make && make install". It will take a while to actually compile - about 8 minutes on my 1Ghz Athlon box. If you're not patient enough for that or just don't like to compile, there's a list of sites that provide binaries on the WINE site. I prefer compiling my own binaries so that I get the cpu optimizations and library dependencies correct. The "./configure" script takes care of this task for you.

OK, you've run "make install" and it copied a lot of libraries and the WINE binary into their default install locations. Now what? Well you'll have to build your config file now. There are two ways to do this. For a newcomer, go to the "Documentation/samples" directory under where you compiled WINE and you will find "config". This is a sample configuration file. Edit it so that the path to where your Windows partition is correct for your system. Copy it to either "/usr/local/etc/wine.conf" or "~/.wine/config". For the more experienced user%2