Wine - LQWiki

From LQWiki

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator, see recursive acronym) is the Windows emulation subsystem. It allows you to run some Windows applications and games on Linux without a copy of Windows.

Applications run under Wine usually operate at the same speed they do in Windows, which makes Wine suitable for playing games, unlike other emulation solutions such as VMware or Win4Lin which actually emulate an entire computer.

Wine works by loading an EXE in the same way Windows would, then linking the program against its own open-source implementations of the various DLLs that make up core Windows functionality. Therefore the capabilities of Wine are linked to how complete its versions of the Microsoft DLLs are.

Because it doesn't emulate an entire computer, the developers named it WINE, which stands for "Wine is not an emulator". The developers refer to Wine as a compatibility layer.

Wine has the following advantages over emulating a fake computer and running Windows inside it:

Applications operate at full speed, making them useful on a day to day basis
Applications integrate with the Linux desktop nicely. For instance they can use your Window Manager, system tray, clipboard and appear in your Linux applications menu.
Wine does not require a copy of Windows, so it is the only long term solution to eliminating the need for Windows entirely.

Unfortunately, Wine has the following disadvantages:

It's not capable of running all applications. Some programs crash, won't install, or have strange glitches that prevent them being useful.
It can be tricky to setup and use
WineHQ does not do real releases, only CVS snapshots. That means you can upgrade and find your program has actually stopped working.
Because it does not emulate the CPU it is i386 only.

In order to alleviate some of these problems, CodeWeavers stepped in and started producing a commercialized version of Wine, which is much easier to use and hacked to work better with popular productivity programs such as Office, DreamWeaver, Lotus Notes and so on. TransGaming have done the same for games with their Cedega product(formerly WineX), but while CodeWeavers still contribute back heavily to the original Wine project, TransGaming have mostly left the community and work on their own proprietary fork.