by Lam Luu

Created on: July 11, 2008

Switching to Linux may be a pain, I admit. Just look at the number of applications you have to part with. However, it is not the end of the world, you know. Actually, it is but the very beginning. You Linux journey is more likely to be fun filled and satisfying. However, there are programs that you may want to use. In that case, let get them work on Linux!

There are two choices: WINE and virtualization.

WINE is an application that provide mechanism running Windows applications as well as libraries for those applications to run. Since Windows has been around for a long time, and has evolved a lot, as well as is a complicated operating system, some programs may not run under WINE. By the way, those need special locales (you want to play a Japanese game, says) will not work with WINE (or I still cannot get them to work). However, don't get discouraged. A lot (majority, I will say) programs do work. I play games with WINE. Microsoft Office is reported to work well. Some guys even run torrent client with WINE (and claim that it runs better than on Windows. Ha). Furthermore, WINE is vastly easier to install and work with. It takes about twenty minutes or less to set up WINE, as opposed to at least a couple of hours for the other option. Almost forget, WINE homepage is at http://www.winehq.org/ .

I believe that most distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva for sure) have WINE in their software repositories. Search for WINE, and it will appear. Oh, remember to try some different cases if you cannot find it (WINE, Wine, wine). If it is totally hopeless, go to the website and download to source. Untar it. Open the terminal, cd to the directory, use the three installing commands (./configure; make; make install). If you feel you are not good enough, please feel free to ask for help, either from your distro community, or from WINE project. In case you have installed WINE automatically, you may be able to right click on the exe file and select "Run with Wine" or something like that (I can do that on Fedora). If not, or if you install manually, please open the terminal, and cd to the directory of your Windows application. Then type "wine the-program-you-want.exe" (without the quotes). Enjoy!

If WINE fails to load, you may try out some non-free solutions based on WINE such as Cedaga. However, don't keep your hope too high. As I said, they are based on WINE. Therefore, if WINE fails, they may fail, too.

If all WINE efforts (should I call them "drinking effort"?) fail, you have several

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