Wine @ Work: Running MS Office and IE on Linux
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 07/28/2008 - 17:06.
King Solomon called wine a mocker and the same can be said of Wine: The software package that runs Windows software under Linux. It mocks the way we think about platform-specific programs and applications — blurring the lines between Windows and Linux.
It mocks the way we think of interoperability and compatibility — drowning the ever-present murmurings about the lack of rich applications for Linux. It mocks the way a certain company markets itself as the only way to run its programs — decreasing the need for a costly and proprietary operating system.
Wine is a liberator, a rebel, and a mocker but it is not an emulator. Wine Is Not an Emulator is the recursive acronym that defines Wine as an implementation of the Windows API and as a translation layer capable of running Windows programs natively on Linux. The Wine developers prefer the more modern and friendly version, Wine to the older, more clever WINE.
Wine Tasting
Wine began its life in 1993 as a way to run Windows 3.1 applications in Linux. Wine may well have had the longest beta period in history at 15 years, however version 1.0 was recently released in June 2008.
In this article, I show you how to install Wine, Microsoft Office 2003, and Internet Explorer using my Red Hat derivative system (CentOS 5.1) as the host. You can give your system some Wine by compiling from source code, or by installing pre-compiled binaries from your distro’s repositories.
Wine is windows apps specific ? Sometimes CrossOver is better ?
Wine is windows(w95 foobar) specific. then platform(cpu) instructions, then apps commands(macros). So, many windows programs are not yet compatible with Wine. Although Wine should have been treated with extensions of windows versions and apps commands, built up on layers and stacks. Linux hosts might be i386 to i686 platforms to be converted to windows versions' platform.
Wine has improved, but not business oriented with goals of implementing needed windows apps.
Here comes CrossOver, which is more money oriented. It sold CrossOver office and IE6.0 to Xandros. CrossOver also has games.
Wine 1.0 release is 15 years late. It can be interesting if you fool around with Linux and have plenty of time to kill to test different windows apps, and maybe even do some coding to make Wine better.
In Linux open sourced community, testing software is the real puzzle to have some quality time, intellectually. It could take days of search and destroy of bugs, fear of incompetency, and despair of hopelessness of Linux technology(bloated codes to handle all the existing protocols). To have fun at this real time hobby?