Wine Installation aid

MarcoND7

Hey guys, I've been looking into Wine so I could run some programs on my Macbook for school. The wiki there said something about downloading the packages, so I looked into it. In HUGE letters at the top of the screen it said something along the lines of BETA PACKAGE and then something about instability. So if you guys wouldn't mind linking me to the download page for a safe download (if there is one) it would be much appreciated.

Also,

Being not exactly the bravest adventurer with new programs (due to some bad expereiences....DAMN YOU TROJAN HORSE!), could somebody tell me how Wine works? I know it runs Microsoft programs on Macs/Linux computers, but is it like a program that runs programs, a secondary OS or what? Once again, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for any help!

theSquid

It's a compatibility layer, the Windows program just has its own window like normal and thinks its running in a Windows environment. As a Linux geek I can tell you that damn near everything of an open source nature is in some kind of beta. Wine has a stable 1.0 release and everything after that is "development" or "unstable", although keep in mind that technically Ubuntu Linux is "unstable" by these standards, so generally you're pretty safe just getting the latest version.

Fact of the matter is that Wine is very hit and miss. Applications older than 5 or so years have a very high chance of working fine, but you would have little chance with something like Office 2007, for example.

Tofystedeth

Yeah, I started playing with Wine the other day at home to see if I could get some of our work software working under Linux. It's amazing how much stuff the log spews out about stub functions, or "change_directory_dirty_hack()" and whatnot happens.

HAKdragon

Your best bet for determining application compatibility would to check the App Database: http://appdb.winehq.org/

Zilla360

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Yeah, I started playing with Wine the other day at home to see if I could get some of our work software working under Linux. It's amazing how much stuff the log spews out about stub functions, or "change_directory_dirty_hack()" and whatnot happens.

That's the challenge for the whole project really. Wine needs to replicate the Win32/64 API not only feature-for-feature, but also bug-for-bug.

It's like trying to build a massively complex jigsaw of, say, a Fractal, only many of the pieces must be intentionally broken in order to fit in one the most esoteric of puzzles. 8-)

MarcoND7

Hey guys, sorry for not responding earlier, but my Internet crashed then I left town. So delays aside, I am responding. My questions have been answered, thank you. But I realize now that I wasn't as clear as I thought... My bad :P

What/where is a good compiled version of it? And if I use it, it won't cause something wierd to happen of which I can't fix, will it?

Thanks for your help, and sorry about not being so clear.

Trentus

I use this guy's builds of Darwine.

MarcoND7

Okay, so I downloaded Darwine. I tried to open it, and It said I needed X11. I downloaded THAT, and now it says there is already a newer version of it installed...*twitch*... I have Xcode installed, what do I do? Thanks again for your help...This...this just refuses to work :P

GrimReaper

Trentus wrote: »

I use this guy's builds of Darwine.

What he said.