Study of free and open source software WINE

AIM: Study of free and open source software WINE

THEORY: Wine is a project which aims to allow a PC running a UNIX-like operating system and the X-windows system to execute programs originally written for Microsoft Windows. Rather than acting as a full emulator Wine implements a compatibility layer providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator.

winecfg is a GUI configuration utility for Wine. winecfg makes configuring Wine easier by making it unnecessary to edit the registry directly.

• Loads Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP, Windows 3.x and DOS programs and libraries

• Win32 compatible memory layout, exception handling, threads and processes

• Designed for POSIX compatible operatings systems (eg. Linux and FreeBSD)

• “bug-for-bug” compatibility with Windows

• X11-based graphics allows remote display to any X terminal

• X11, TrueType (.ttf/.ttc) and Windows Bitmap (.fon) Fonts

• DirectX support for games (limited Direct3D support)

• Support for OpenGL based games and applications

• Printing via PostScript driver or legacy native Win16 printer drivers

• Enhanced Metafile (EMF) and Windows Metafile (WMF) driver

• Desktop-in-a-box or mixable windows

• Windows MultiMedia (WinMM) layer support with builtin codecs

• Designed for source and binary compatibility with Win32 code

• Win32 API test suite to ensure compatibility

• Compilable on a wide range of C compilers

• Permits mixing of Win32 and POSIX code

•  Win32 compatible header files

• Automatically generated API documentation

• Resource compiler

• Message compiler

• IDL compiler

• Extensive Unicode support

• Internationalization — Wine supports 16 languages

• Built-in debugger and configurable trace messages

Wine provides following benefits over Windows right now:

• Wine makes it possible to take advantage of all the Unix strong points (stability, flexibility, remote administration) while still using the Windows applications you depend on.

• Unix has always made it possible to write powerful scripts. Wine makes it possible to call Windows applications from scripts that can also leverage the Unix environment to its full extent.

• Wine makes it possible to access Windows applications remotely, even if they are a few thousand miles away.

• Wine makes it economical to use thin clients: simply install Wine on a Linux server, and voila, you can access these Windows applications from any X terminal.

• Wine can also be used to make existing Windows applications available on the Web by using VNC and its Java client.

• Wine is Open Source Software, so you can extend it to suit your needs or have one of many companies do it for you.

You can simply invoke the wine command to get a small help message:

Wine 20040405

Usage: wine PROGRAM [ARGUMENTS…]   Run the specified program

       wine –help                   Display this help and exit

       wine –version                Output version information and exit

The first argument should be the name of the file you want wine to execute. If the executable is in the Path environment variable, you can simply give the executable file name. However, if the executable is not in Path, you must give the full path to the executable (in Windows format, not UNIX format!). For example, given a Path of the following:

Path=”c:\windows;c:\windows\system;e:\;e:\test;f:\”

You could run the file c:\windows\system\foo.exe with:

$ wine foo.exe

However, you would have to run the file c:\myapps\foo.exe with this command:

$ wine c:\\myapps\\foo.exe

CONCLUSION-Hereby,we have studied the free and open source software,WINE.