cmurray.org

(Disclosure: The title of this post is meant to attract Borgy101′s attention, for all the wrong reasons.)

I tried Wine on a Linux machine several years ago to run Photoshop within that platform. Wine is an emulator which allows you to run Windows applications as if they were native to Linux. I have to say that it was a huge and frustrating failure. I believe the issues were primarily with Wine not having the proper DLLs from Windows to make applications run properly.

Having rebuilt my LAMP system here at home using VMWare, I now have a good development environment for trying such things again without breaking my production environment and my blog. With this, I installed and configured Wine to run several Windows apps within my Ubuntu Linux space. I have to say that I am extremely pleased with how easy it is to get working and how well the programs run once installed.

One big difference from how I am using Wine now from back then is that my initial trials were on a dual-boot system and the Windows apps I was using already were installed within the Windows partition of that machine. I believe this is why Linux had trouble running the applications and finding the library files; it had to cross many parts of the system and make those connections, which it often could not do.

In this new environment, I am not working with an existing Windows installation. I am merely using the Wine configuration manager to create a ‘fake’ windows file system, and then installing the applications from CD or .exe files directly into this environment. Therefore, everything the application needs to run is known by the Wine server at runtime.

As I said, this appears to run remarkably well. The applications I have tried so far include Picasa (the wonderful photo storage and imaging tool from Google), Trillian (a cross-provider IM app), and of course, Photoshop (Linux does come with GIMP, a really great impersonation of Photoshop, but I had to install Photoshop just to see).