Ubuntu
gnome-terminal package

Wine help and info.

Asked by Westin Lohne

I have heard about Wine(the windows emulator). I installed it (from add or remove apps)and iTunes. It was a completely regular installation. When i then tried to open iTunes the box popped up...but the inside of the whole box was grey. There was nothing. Just all grey. I restarted the computer and still, all grey.

Can anyone please tell me if i did anything rong? Does Wine actually work? Does it hurt your system at all?
I'm running Ubuntu 7.10.

Thanks,
Westin

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Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini) said : 		#1

Some applications, such as iTunes, cannot run under wine.
If you want to use iTunes you should try to use crossover or a virtual PC, but there are a lot of open source alternatives, such as gtkpod, rhytmhbox, amarok, ...

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Westin Lohne (westin) said : 		#2

 Can you please tell me how to install and download?

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Westin Lohne (westin) said : 		#3

** one of those

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Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini) said : 		#4

Rhytmhbox is preinstalled in Ubuntu.
For amarok and friends choose Applications→Add Remove and search for them.

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Heather "Starshine" Stern (heather-starshine-stern) said : 		#5

WINE does work, at least for me. What is often confusing to people is how, and why, it works.

There is a stable version, which Ubuntu makes extremely easy to install. There is a development (in this case that means "bleeding edge", not a programming environment) version on winehq.com, which you can follow links at to add a Sources line to your synaptic setup, and then it is exactly as easy to install as the regular one.

WINE works, *per application*, by providing an mswin .EXE file the same DLL and object code environment that it should expect if it were really on MS Windows(tm). Or as close as the open source community has been able to squeeze out of it. This means that there are a few options that may be tweaked per application to make an app happy. And... unfortunately *just like Windows* ... some apps are really hard to make happy. The kind folks at WIneHQ have an App DataBase full of notes about which apps work great and which need to be clunked on the head with a baseball bat.

But it does mean there are options tunable in WINE like "pretend to be XP for this one, and Win2003 for that". Also it is working deep magic on the X11 Window environment to make the pretend environment work, so it isn't really a capsule like you get out of VMware guests, dosemu or other things called virtualization. That's the real reason why the full name is: "Wine Is Not an Emulator" :)

Make sure your video drivers are as shiny-clean and new as your kernel is, and WINE tends to work really well, for either well behaved Windows apps (stop giggling, they do exist) or for popular enough apps that some happy energy in the community is poured into solving them (I play World of Warcraft under it, and it's only about as weird as it sometimes gets on a Windows box too).

Hope that helps!

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