Run Windows Applications On Linux With WINE 1.0

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Wine Software Making the jump to Linux is making more sense all the time. Now with the stable release of WINE 1.0, you can run most of your favorite Windows applications on the Linux platform.

The main reason a lot of people have held off from changing over to Linux is for just that reason. It’s hard to want to relearn a new software as extensive as Photoshop, so we just stay with Windows or Mac because it’s more comfortable. Not to mention time saving when there’s a business decision involved. But WINE claims that Photoshop CS2 runs on Linux with it installed on your machine, along with 10,336 other Windows based applications.

The biggest problem for them is going to be keeping up with the changes and upgrades to Window’s operating system. And to make it even more difficult, keeping up with the software changes to the individual applications themselves.

A little bit about WINE.
WINE (WIN Emulator). The name is actually derived from the acronym Wine IS Not An Emulator. The project has been in the development stage now for 15 years. The project has proven to be very time-consuming and difficult for the developers because of the continuous advances in software technology. Wine is always going to be having to play “catch-up”!

Wine implements a compatibility layer, providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and processes to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. Wine is an open source implementation of the Window’s API allowing Windows applications to run on other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS, without the need to run Windows.

Wine recently got a great boost from Google when they were asked to fix Wine so Picasa ran well enough to be ported directly to Linux.

I’ve installed it and will be testing it over the next couple of weeks to see if it’s all what it’s cracked up to be. I certainly hope it is, because I think it will be a great option to the overpriced Windows packages!

Stay tuned!