1.1.1. Windows and Linux

Many people have faced the frustration of owning software that won't run on their computer. With the recent popularity of Linux, this is happening more and more often because of differing operating systems. Your Windows software won't run on Linux, and your Linux software won't run in Windows.

A common solution to this problem is to install both operating systems on the same computer, as a "dual boot" system. If you want to write a document in MS Word, you can boot up in Windows; if you want to run the GnuCash, the GNOME financial application, you can shut down your Windows session and reboot into Linux. The problem with this is that you can't do both at the same time. Each time you switch back and forth between MS Word and GnuCash, you have to reboot again. This can get tiresome quickly.

Life would be so much easier if you could run all your applications on the same system, regardless of whether they are written for Windows or for Linux. On Windows, this isn't really possible, yet. [1] However, Wine makes it possible to run native Windows applications alongside native Linux applications on any Unix-like system. You can share desktop space between MS Word and GnuCash, overlapping their windows, iconizing them, and even running them from the same launcher.

1.1.2. Emulation versus Native Linking

Wine is a UNIX implementation of the win32 libraries, written from scratch by hundreds of volunteer developers and released under an open source license. Anyone can download and read through the source code, and fix bugs that arise. The Wine community is full of richly talented programmers who have spent thousands of hours of personal time on improving Wine so that it works well with the win32 Applications Programming Interface (API), and keeps pace with new developments from Microsoft.

Wine can run applications in two discrete ways: as pre-compiled Windows binaries, or as natively compiled X11 (X-Window System) applications. The former method uses emulation to connect a Windows application to the Wine libraries. You can run your Windows application directly with the emulator, by installing through Wine or by simply copying the Windows executables onto your Linux system.

The other way to run Windows applications with Wine requires that you have the source code for the application. Instead of compiling it with native Windows compilers, you can compile it with a native Linux compiler -- gcc for example -- and link in the Wine Libraries as you would with any other native UNIX application. These natively linked applications are referred to as Winelib applications.

The Wine Users Guide will focus on running precompiled Windows applications using the Wine emulator. The Winelib Users Guide will cover Winelib applications.

1.1.3. Burning questions and comments

If during reading this document there is something you can't figure out, or think could be explained better, or that should have been included, please immediately mail to either the WineHQ Web-Admin <web-admin@winehq.com> or the wine-devel Mailing List <wine-devel@winehq.com>, or post a bug report to Wine's Bugzilla to let us know how this document can be improved. Remember, Open Source is "free as in free speech, not as in free beer": it can only work in the case of very active involvement of its users !