Wine: Not Another Emulator - Features and potential issues
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All this looks like a massive investment and a lot of trouble from the start, both from the user and the development team. So the obvious question is, why should we struggle to make this happen and work? There are multiple reasons.
Wine will diversify your options. It will let you use applications designed solely for Windows under your Unix system, as well as the applications designed just for Unix. It will also make the market healthier. Currently Microsoft has a market share of 95% on personal computers, and of an 80% if we add to this the Macs.
We start to heavily depend on the Microsoft operating system, and this is not a good thing. If anything goes wrong with it (an unexpected virus, for example) we are very vulnerable. Wine can assure that you can keep using the applications designed for Windows; it is not the same as running Windows, and does not have the same faults.
This will also lower the barrier that prevents many users from switching to Linux from Windows. Remember that Linux distributions are usually free, while Microsoft wants you to pay for every new version of their product. Do you have a few applications you prefer under Windows, without which you cannot work? With Wine, you don't need to let them hold you back from switching to Linux. Wine will assure that if there is not a Linux distribution that runs the application, it will still run for you.
The Wine open source project is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It will also allow users to call Windows applications from scripts, access the application remotely from any other system, or even put it on the Web with VNC plus its Java Client. It allows you to run applications that would never ever otherwise be compiled for Unix systems, like the MS Office suite. With Wine, you can use applications like Media Player or even play games like Max Payne, Spore or more modern ones like Bioshock.
The main factor that slows the evolution of the project is that Microsoft provides incomplete and sometimes incorrect documentation about the API. Even worse, while most of the functions are documented, some portions, like file systems and protocols, are not discussed in any official paper.
The only viable solution to figuring out these issues is the black box strategy. This translates to observing what the function should do and offering a solution that does the same thing. More importantly, Windows has a couple of obscure bugs that, in order for some applications to work correctly, must also function in the same fashion in Wine. This is called a bug-for-bug system.
Other significant features offer the capability to load Windows programs and libraries, exception handling like the Win32 system, memory management and translation into basic Windows signals. Applications will run normally, and all of the messages/services offered by Windows are handled by a daemon process known as wineserver. Wine is not a module to translate the messages to Unix messages. It offers its own solution for problems.
