What is Wine. Is it part of Ubuntu?
I want to run MS Office on Ubuntu and have found messages saying you can do it with Wine, but I don't know what Wine is.
Solution 1:
My first impression is that Wine is a simulated Windows environment which uses free (and presumably open source) libraries as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary libraries. Those libraries produce the same input and output, yet use alternative means to process the data. This would explain why there is very little performance hit.
Yes, that is exactly correct.
Most people assume it's an emulation layer but it's more of an interpreter, managing where Windows would normally provide resources and mapping that to Ubuntu. Of course there are situations where Ubuntu (and its drivers) don't or can't provide the same resources (like the various Direct3D pipelines) so in cases like those you can often see overhead from the translation process.
The biggest case of this is converting Direct3D into OpenGL. It's a process that is very sensitive to latency. This is undergoing huge work right at the moment (the "CSMT patches") to multi-thread the OpenGL translation and command streams. IMO it's getting close to native speed.
But if you're using a Windows OpenGL application, it's possible you'll see native-like performance.
The big outstanding issues in Wine come mostly from needing to reimplement libraries. For gamers this is mostly latest DirectX stuff (DX10 and 11 aren't implemented yet) but there are all sorts of applications that can exhibit strange corner-case bugs.
Solution 2:
- Wine is a free and open source software application that aims to allow computer programs written for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.
- Wine is a compatibility layer. It duplicates functions of a Windows computer by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. This method of duplication differs from other methods that might also be considered emulation, where Windows programs run in a virtual machine. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues.
- Wine comes in a bundle pack with a separate program known as WineBottler. It basically accomplishes the same task as its counterpart, yet it does so in a more simplified, automatic way. Where as Wine is much more manual requiring the user to input codes to accomplish a task. WineBottler cannot run alone, as it requires Wine to run for some Windows programs.
- The name Wine initially was an acronym for WINdows Emulator. Its meaning later shifted to the recursive backronym, Wine Is Not an Emulator in order to differentiate the software from other emulators. While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine.
Is it a part of ubuntu?
No. It is an open source application available for ubuntu
Installation
How do I install wine?
Links
- http://www.winehq.org/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29