Wine is now more mature and almost on the rocks. I tried using
wine-20040716-1rh73winehq.i686.rpm on a MEPIS Desktop. It could
install and run many windows applications with the simple commands:
#wine SETUP.EXE //set up program for foo.exe
#wine foo.exe
WinZip and PKZip work fine on wine. I could install and use the
following:
Free Software* by Mark Overmars
http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/
This includes a good Drawing Program for Children, programs that
describe basic problems in robotics etc. Most of the source code is
available.
Home Planet by John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/homeplanet.html
(The binary is in public domain, but, John walker has promised to
release the source code by the end of this year)
Sonique Music Player
http://sonique.lycos.com/download/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ gives a list of applications that are known
to run on wine. Wine could help many existing windows users, to
migrate to GNU/Linux with more confidence. Application like Visual Fox
Pro run well and this may help many to migrate to free software more
smoothly.
One of the key issues may be that IE does not yet run on wine. This
means VC++ does not run well on wine (Why should installing a compiler
depend on an application like IE? Amazing, but looks like that is how
things work in the windows world.) I could run and install Netscape
6, and the more recent wine versions could be set up as servers, and
run Fire Fox. Mozilla is compatible with the windows IE API, and a
Mozilla Activex Control is available that could totally replace IE.
But the issue is that one has to build Mozilla with VC, and VC wont
install without IE. I am not sure I am correct here, but if any of you
are familiar with how these things work, please think of contributing
to the wine project.
Many are attached to windows like children are attached to toys.
Letting them keep their toys at ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files that
looks just like C:\Programs Files while wine runs, should be very
reassuring and make the transition from non-free to free software a
very comfortable one.
Why Wine and more info is available at:
http://www.winehq.com/site/why
http://www.winehq.com/site/wine_features
Thanks,
Ramanraj.