Seminar Report ’09

WINE

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 WINDOWS AND LINUX

Different software programs are designed for different operating systems,

and most won’t work on systems that they weren’t designed for. Windows programs, for
example, won’t run in Linux because they contain instructions that the system can’t
understand until they’re translated by the Windows environment. Linux programs,
likewise, won’t run under the Windows operating system because Windows is unable to
interpret all of their instructions.

This situation presents a fundamental problem for anyone who wants to run
software for both Windows and Linux. A common solution to this problem is to install
both operating systems on the same computer, known as "dual booting." When a Windows
program is needed, the user boots the machine into Windows to run it; when a Linux
program is then needed, the user then reboots the machine into Linux. This option presents
great difficulty: not only must the user endure the frustration of frequent rebooting, but
programs for both platforms can’t be run simultaneously. Having Windows on a system
also creates an added burden: the software is expensive, requires a separate disk partition,
and is unable to read most file system formats, making the sharing of data between
operating systems difficult.

1.2 WHAT IS WINE?

Wine makes it possible to run Windows programs alongside any Unix-like

operating system, particularly Linux. At its heart, Wine is an implementation of the
Windows Application Programming Interface (API) library, acting as a bridge between the
Windows program and Linux. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer, when a Windows
program

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tries to perform a function that Linux doesn’t normally understand, Wine will translate
that program’s instruction into one supported by the system. For example, if a program
asks the system to create a Windows pushbutton or text-edit field, Wine will convert that
instruction into its Linux equivalent in the form of a command to the window
manager using the standard X11 protocol.

Wine is often used as a recursive acronym, standing for "Wine Is

Not an Emulator". Sometimes it is also known to be used for "Windows Emulator"
(An emulator duplicates (provides an emulation of) the functions of one system using a
different system, so that the second system behaves like (and appears to be) the first
system.). In a way, both meanings are correct, only seen from different perspectives. The
first meaning says that Wine is not a virtual machine, it does not emulate a CPU, and you
are not supposed to install Windows nor any Windows device drivers on top of it; rather,
Wine is an implementation of the Windows API, and can be used as a library to port
Windows applications to UNIX. The second meaning, obviously, is that to Windows
binaries (.exe files), Wine does look like Windows, and emulates its behaviour and quirks
rather closely.

1.3 WINE FEATURES

Throughout the course of its development, Wine has continually grown in the
features it carries and the programs it can run. A partial list of these features follows:

 Support for running Win32 (Win 95/98, NT/2000/XP), Win16 (Win 3.1) and DOS
programs.
 Optional use of external vendor DLL files (such as those included with Windows).
 X11-based graphics display, allowing remote display to any X terminal, as well as a
text mode console.
 Desktop-in-a-box or mixable windows.
 DirectX support for games.

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 Modem, serial device support.

 ASPI interface (SCSI) support for scanners, CD writers, and other devices.
 Advanced unicode and foreign language support.

1.4 WINE VERSIONS

Wine is an open source project, and there are accordingly many different versions
of Wine for you to choose from. The standard version of Wine comes in intermittent
releases (roughly twice a month), and can be downloaded over the internet in both
prepackaged binary form and ready to compile source code form. Alternatively, we can
install a development version of Wine by using the latest available source code from the
Git repository.

1.5 WINE BENEFITS

 Wine makes it possible to take advantage of all the UNIX strong points (stability,
flexibility, remote administration) while still using the Windows applications you
depend on.

 UNIX has always made it possible to write powerful scripts. Wine makes it possible
to call Windows applications from scripts that can also leverage the UNIX
environment to its full extent.

 Wine makes it possible to access Windows applications remotely, even if they are a
few thousand miles away.

 Wine makes it economical to use thin clients: simply install Wine on a Linux server,
and voila, you can access these Windows applications from any X terminal.

 Wine can also be used to make existing Windows applications available on the Web
by using VNC and its Java client.

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 Wine is Open Source Software, so you can extend it to suit your needs or have one
of many companies do it for you.

1.6 WINE SIZE

Wine is not small at all. WINE 1.0 have over 1.8 million lines of C code (with blank lines
and comments), ~300,000 of which are tests, and ~87000 are related to Direct3D (a subset
of DirectX) implementation [original research]. That's because what a UNIX program
assumes to find in a system is much less that what a Windows application assumes to find
(which are thousands of Windows APIs [10]).

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2. WINE INSTALLATION METHODS

2.1 INSTALLATION FROM A PACKAGE

By far the easiest method for installing Wine is to use a prepackaged version of
Wine. These packages contain ready-to-run Wine binary files specifically compiled for
your distribution, and they are tested regularly by the packagers for both functionality and
completeness.
Packages are the recommended method for installing Wine. It is available at the
WineHQ downloads page (http://www.winehq.org/site/download), and these are always
the latest packages available. Being popular, Wine packages can also be found elsewhere
in official distribution repositories. These can, however, sometimes be out of date,
depending on the distribution. Packages are easily upgradable as well, and many
distributions can upgrade Wine seamlessly with a few clicks. Building our own installable
binary package from a source package is also possible.

2.2 INSTALLATION FROM A SOURCE ARCHIVE

Sometimes the Wine packages don’t fit our needs exactly. Perhaps they’re not
available for our architecture or distribution, or perhaps we want to build wine using our
own compiler optimizations or with some options disabled or perhaps we need to modify
a specific part of the source code before compilation. Being an open source project, we are
free to do all of these things with Wine’s source code, which is provided with every Wine
release. This method of installation can be done by downloading a Wine source archive
and compiling from the command line.
Getting Wine source archives is simple. Every release, a source package in

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Compressed tar.bz2 format is provided at the WineHQ downloads page

(http://www.winehq.org/site/download). Compiling and installing Wine from source is
slightly more difficult than using a package.

2.3 INSTALLATION FROM A GIT TREE

If we wish to help develop Wine yourself, we can download the very latest source
code from Git repository. Instructions for downloading from the Wine Git repository are
available at http://www.winehq.org/site/git (http://www.winehq.org/site/git).
The source code on the Git repository is largely untested and may not even compile
properly. It is, however, the best way to test out how Wine will work in the next version,
and if we’re modifying source code it’s best to get the latest copy. The Git repository is
also useful for application maintainers interested in testing if an application will still work
right for the next release, or if a recent patch actually improves things.

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3. INSTALLING WINE FROM A PACKAGE

3.1 INSTALLING A FRESH PACKAGE

Installing a package on a fresh system is remarkably straightforward. Simply download

and install the package using whatever utility your distribution provides. There is usually
no need to explicitly remove old packages before installing, as modern Linux distributions
should upgrade and replace them automatically. If we installed Wine from source code,
however, you should remove it before installing a Wine package.

3.2 DIFFERENT DISTRIBUTIONS

Wine works on a huge amount of different Linux distributions, as well other Unix-like
systems such as Solaris and FreeBSD, each with their own specific way of installing and
managing packages. Fortunately, however, the same general ideas apply to all of them,
and installing Wine should be no more difficult than installing any other software, no
matter what distribution you use. Uninstalling Wine packages is simple as well, and in
modern Linux distributions are usually done through the same easy interface as package
installation.

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4. INSTALLATION FROM SOURCE

Before installing Wine from source, make sure you uninstall any Wine binary packages
you may have on your system. Installing from source requires use of the terminal window
as well as a full copy of the Wine source code.

4.1 GETTING THE BUILD DEPENDENCIES

Wine makes use of many open source libraries during its operation. While Wine is
not strictly dependent on these libraries and will compile without most of them, much of
Wine’s functionality is improved by having them available at compile time. In the past,
many user problems were caused by people not having the necessary development
libraries when they built Wine from source; because of this reason and others, we highly
recommend installing via binary packages or by building source packages which can
automatically satisfy their build dependencies.
If you wish to install build dependencies by hand, there are several ways to see if
you’re missing some useful development libraries. The most straightforward approach is
to watch the configure program’s output before you compile Wine and see if anything
important is missing; if it is, simply install what’s missing and rerun configure before
compiling.

4.2 LIBRARY SETTINGS

Likewise, some applications require specific libraries in order to run. Wine reproduces the
Windows system libraries (so-called native DLL’s) with completely custom versions
designed to function exactly the same way but without requiring licenses from Microsoft.

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Wine has many known deficiencies in its built-in versions, but in many instances the
functionality is sufficient. Using only built-in DLL’s ensures that your system is
Microsoft-free. However, Wine has the ability to load native Windows DLL’s.

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5. ARCHITECTURE

5.1 WINDOWS NT ARCHITECTURE

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5.2 WINE ARCHITECTURE

Wine implementation is closer to the Windows NT architecture.

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Wine must at least completely replace the "Big Three" DLL (KERNEL/KERNEL32,
GDI/GDI32, and USER/USER32), which all other DLLs are layered on top of. But since
Wine is (for various reasons) leaning towards the NT way of implementing things,
the NTDLL is another core DLL to be implemented in Wine, and many KERNEL32 and
ADVAPI32 features will be implemented through the NTDLL.

The Wine server provides the backbone for the implementation of the core DLLs. It
mainly implements inter-process synchronization and object sharing. It can be seen, from
a functional point of view, as a NT kernel (even if the APIs and protocols used between
Wine’s DLL and the Wine server are Wine specific).

All DLLs provided by Wine try to stick as much as possible to the exported APIs
from the Windows platforms.

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6. WINE HQ

Wine homepage can be found at:

www.winehq.org
It gives:
 Information about wine.
 Wine can be downloaded from here.
 Provides help.
 Provides development reports.

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7. COMMAND LINE

7.1 OPTIONS

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 wine --help
Shows a small command line help page.
 wine --version
Shows the Wine version string. Useful to verify your installation.
Command line options are entered in the terminal.

7.2 INSTALLING FROM TERMINAL

 Command line can be used for installing wine (alternatively used).

$sudo apt-get install wine

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7.3 UNINSTALLING FROM TERMINAL

 Simply enter the following in the terminal window :-

$sudo apt-get uninstall wine

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8. ALTERNATIVES TO WINE

8.1 ANOTHER OPERATING SYSTEM

Probably the most obvious method of getting a Windows application to run is to simply
run it on Windows. However, security, license cost, backward-compatibility, and machine
efficiency issues can make this a difficult proposition, which is why Wine is so useful in
the first place.
Another alternative is to use ReactOS (http://www.reactos.com), which is a fully open
source alternative to Windows. ReactOS shares code heavily with the Wine project, but
rather than running Windows applications on top of Linux they are instead run on top of
the ReactOS kernel. ReactOS also offers compatibility with Windows driver files,
allowing the use of hardware without functional Linux drivers.

8.2 VIRTUAL MACHINES

Rather than installing an entirely new operating system on your machine, we can instead
run a virtual machine at the software level and install a different operating system on it.
Thus, we could run a Linux system and at the same time run Windows along with your
application in a virtual machine simultaneously on the same hardware. Virtual machines
allow us to install and run not only different versions of Windows on the same hardware,
but also other operating systems, including ReactOS.
There are several different virtual machine offerings out there, and some are also able to
emulate x86 hardware on different platforms. The open source Bochs
(http://bochs.sourceforge.net/) and QEMU (http://www.qemu.org/) can run both Windows

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and ReactOS virtually. Other, commercial virtual machine offerings include Vmware
(http://www.vmware.com/) and Microsoft’s Virtual PC
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/). There are significant drawbacks to using
virtual machines, however. Unlike Wine, such programs are emulators, so here is an
inevitable speed decrease which can be quite substantial. Furthermore, running an
application inside a virtual machine prevents fully integrating the application within the
current environment. We won’t, for example, be able to have windows system tray icons
or program shortcuts sitting alongside our desktop Linux ones, since instead the Windows
applications must reside completely within the virtual machine.

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9. SCREEN SHOTS ON WINE

An error occurred while trying to open an .exe file before installing Wine software.

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Wine installation through a package by clicking on it.

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After Wine installation. Now there is a new place for Wine under the ‘Applications’ menu.

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Installation of VLC media player in Ubuntu using Wine software.

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VLC media player working in Ubuntu (Linux) environment due to Wine.

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Uninstalling of software’s that were installed using Wine also can be done.

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10. CONCLUSION

Wine is not complete, because it faces up with problems like catching up with
more recent Windows systems. For example (not saying this have actually happened)
when they completely supported Windows 95 applications, they were struck by XP, and
then the XP SP1 and Windows 2000 (there are many editions in middle). Wine
development is indeed much slower than the real development pace of the real Windows
(thousands of organized developers vs. hundreds of random contributers-700 have
contributed to Wine).

Hope that Wine will overcome all its disadvantages and result in an all-
round development of Linux systems.

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11. BIBLIOGRAPHY

 www.winehq.org

 www.wikipedia.org

 www.about.com

 www.stason.org

 www.scribd.com

 www.codeweavers.com

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