Running Windows applications on virtual machines is a frequent topic after users migrate from Windows to Linux. A virtual setup saves you the trouble of maintaining a parallel Windows installation on the same hard drive and dual-booting between the environments. However, if you want to use just a few Windows programs, setting up a virtual machine is overkill, given that the performance and handling of a virtual Windows system on a Linux PC is only practical if you set up the guest extensions. Working in this way is therefore quite expensive, because you must have a Windows license to set up a normal Windows installation on the virtual machine. Additionally, you need to update the drivers for the virtualization program after each kernel update.

A more elegant solution is to have Linux pretend to be a Windows system environment so that Windows programs "see" the usual system calls, libraries, and interfaces. One such program, CrossOver Linux [2], does just this. It is an enhanced version of Wine [1] that supports a number of Windows applications.

Spoofing a Windows Environment with Wine

When your Linux computer pretends to be a Windows machine, programs can run without the overhead of a virtual environment at something close to native speed. Unfortunately, Windows is not open source, and the information you need to emulate the Windows environment is not generally available. However, the developers of the open source Wine project have focused since 1993 on the Herculean task of analyzing and building something similar to the Windows system environment through reverse engineering. Not all Windows libraries have been built, though, in which case Wine can use the libraries (DLL files) of an existing Windows version to improve compatibility – again, you need a Windows license for this.

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