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What IS emulation


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this is probably posted somewhere else, but I can't find it ATM...anyways, after spending about an hour or 2 messing with it (first day of Linux) I finally got wine installed...and am wonder what the point of it is? text files can be opened by Linux anyways, and I've trid 4 or 5 exes, none of which worked...so what exactly are windows emulators for?

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The windows emulators are by no means complete. In theory they should allow any windows program to run on Linux. Unfortunately, the entire win32 API is not yet complete.

 

Glitz.

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Depends on what version of wine you get. i ususally get the daily builds, somedays its badly broken, somedays it works. its best to get the builds co the ones with mandrake ive had probs with and are older.

 

http://wine.dataparty.no

 

have fun. You will also need to configure wine, get an rpm for winesetuptk here:

 

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wi...86.rpm?download

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Just to answer your question in the topic:

 

Programs designed using the Windows API use special "system calls" that Linux does not recognise natively, so what an emulator, like WINE does, is change Windows API system calls into calls that Linux can understand. That's why running programs through emulation will always be slower than natively.

 

Hope that helps.

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Think of emulators as OS translators, whether it is a full blown OS like windows, or an embedded and dedicated OS, like for nintendo or atari. The ones that work well, are not for games, but for productivity applications.

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THe underlying question here that I don't see anyone answering is this "Since none of my winodws software works anyway, what's the damn point?"

 

If that is your real question, here's my answer.

 

The first thing tokeep inmind, is that as several people have pointed out, wine is beta at best. It only works for a very small percentage of software. The commercial versions of wineX and crossover are both better, but that's a whole seperate open vs. closed source debate.

 

The problem is that what you need wine for and what wine IS for are two different things.

 

Because there is no way the wine project could ge even half of the windows apps working, they must pick their battles carefully. So they make sure it's as compatible as possible with the programs that the greated number of peopl find criticle and can't be done natively. What's criticle to you or I however, may not be wortha hill of beans to the average joe. Perfect example - There does not exist a native linux ap for making CD labels. There's lot's of apps, like cdlabelgen that will make jewel case labels and there's an OO template for memorex CD labels and many graphics programs that will do the job with a litle work, but not one of them are good solid dedicated CD label programs. While a good label maker is REALLY important to me, none of the good ones work under wine, so I'm s.o.l.

 

Versions of Word, up to 200 are known to work quitoe well, maple works (though there'sa native version of it that is fantastic) And a few of my old DOS/Win95 games play in GL wine.

 

About 15% of the windows games I own from my pre-linux days are 'playable' under wineX, and Crosover playes VERY nic with my coppy of Office 2000 (well, it plays nice with Word and Excell anyway) but I can't afford the registered version, so my demo is spent.

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