Hands on: How to get more from Linux

Following the recent releases of two popular Linux distributions, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, we are looking at a couple of additional pieces of software you might want to install onto a fresh installation of either.

This is assuming that you have installed all the updates and, for Ubuntu, the recommended Ubuntu Restricted Extras (found in the Add/Remove Applications program).

A 15-year vintage
Along with the spring and early summer releases of the main Linux distributions, another important release was Wine 1.0. It has taken 15 years of development to reach this first milestone release, since the project was started back in 1993 by Bob Amstadt to get Windows 3.1 programs to run under Linux.

Since then it has grown to support applications developed for all versions of Windows, and has been ported to several other platforms (it is even possible to run under Windows itself).

If you are confused as to what Wine is, it’s really quite simple. When a Windows executable normally runs, much of the code involves making calls to the Windows operating system in order to perform various tasks.

Wine creates a translation layer between Linux and the Windows executable; in other words, these operating system calls are translated on the fly into equivalent calls on Linux and the graphical desktop it is running.

The major benefit of this method is that no version of Windows is required to run the applications.
All the code to perform the translation is part of Wine, which is fully open source and contains no Microsoft code.

A drawback, and it is a major one, is that a reverse-engineered product such as this is far from perfect ­ while many applications run perfect or nearly so, some don’t run at all. Also, since the binary is run directly on the CPU without any emulation, only Intel-compatible processors are supported.

With the lead-up to Wine 1.0 came a feature freeze, where only bug fixes were accepted. This led to a large number of long-outstanding bugs being resolved, and many minor issues with applications fixed. The Wine website has a subsidiary site devoted to information about compatibility with applications and games.