CodeWeavers (small company) supports wine project, by resending all patches to it, and by paying to several wine developers. Usually you should pay some (40 US$) money to CodeWeavers, developers of CrossOver, in order to use the package for long time and have support.
#HOW DOES WINE EMULATOR WORK INSTALL#
Some Windows programs are using APIs or libraries which are not implemented, so they can't work with WINE.Īnd what is parallel packages like cross-over,play on linux?Ĭrossover is commercial variant of WINE with better support, some helper GUI tools (to easy install some software) and verified compatibility list of working windows programs and games. WINE can't have the exact implementation of all WinAPI (some parts of it are undocumented) and all needed libraries.
#HOW DOES WINE EMULATOR WORK SOFTWARE#
However it is not fully supports several software of windows and graphics. It is useful to have the capability to start applications that are made to run on another OS, especially if this other OS is used widely, and has a lot of software (and games) created exclusively for it which can't be started directly from any other OS like Unix, Solaris or Linux. WINE was projected much before Ubuntu was created, the project was started in 1993 after Solaris's similar project "Wabi". Why it is projected (or what is need/why it should allow to) to run windows programmes on Ubuntu? It just loads a program into memory and provides an API translation from WinAPI to the host's POSIX/Linux APIs (and Xlib for graphics and mouse, and some other API for sound, etc). WINE is not an emulator because it doesn't interpret instructions of target binary or simulate processors.
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Emulators usually emulate an entire PC, starting from the BIOS, processors and HDDs, and they boot into the OS you install on this virtual PC. For example, there is the great qemu (name decoded as "Quick EMUlator"), or an older x86 emulator written in C - bochs. So, emulators of ARM are possible on x86 (Intel). Then Why wine is important and what means by "Wine Is Not an Emulator"?Īn emulator should load program instructions, parse them, and imitate their actions. This difference is not about package management, but about interfacing between programs, libraries, and OS kernels.
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Different APIs don't let you, for example, open the file, and read from it, if you are using wrong API. Windows has WinAPI, and Linux has POSIX API, with some additional Linux-specific APIs, graphics APIs (like X11) and with its own Linux ABI. If the program wants to do something that Linux can't do, then Wine translates the call into something that Linux can deal with first.īoth OSs (Windows and Ubuntu) have different APIs (and ABIs (Application Binary Interface)). If your Windows program makes calls that Linux can handle, then Wine passes them on to the Linux kernel. Attempting to call into the Windows kernel directly is unsupported. Wine also has the ability to load native Windows DLLs. Wine provides its own versions of various Window system DLLs. There can be several helper programs inside WINE too.Īs there is two different operating system windows (closed source) and Ubuntu (Linux open-source) Also, there is special loader of windows programs which can read EXE file, load it and all needed DLL libraries to the memory, connect everything with internal Wine libraries and system libraries and run it. So, WINE is set of in-house developed libraries, one side of which (visible to programs) is the Windows API, and the other side (visible to linux kernel and linux libraries, like glibc and libX11) is POSIX, Linux and X11 API. It duplicates functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel."