Wine in Ubuntu is the best!

Wine allowed me to install a certain proprietary piece of windows only software (starts with an eff and ends in an assssh) to get some crucial web development work done yesterday when I was home sick. It didn't work with the most current version, which means that I'll have to go back and redo some stuff with the 8-core screamer at the Mito office, but I made some major progress with the software none the less.

If you're not a linux user, that means that there's no reason for you to know about Wine, but essentially it provides a layer of functionality to your linux setup--the ability to run windows programs seemlessly. Mac users know that this has been possible since the OS 9 days, but it requires a layer of processor hogging OS emulation, and hasn't really been a viable option until the recent releases of vmware Fusion and Parallels 4 (3 was ok too). On the mac tip, I use vmware Fusion and love it!

The main problem with emulating the entire OS is that it really is a burden on your processor and your ram comsumption, in addition to requiring booting or unfreezing before you can start using it. Also, it requires a copy of Windows to install on top of the copy of vmware or Paralells you purchased. Wine acts as an Windows API layer over X in Linux, bypassing the need to purchase an OS that you don't really want.

In the past, Wine has been somewhat a piece of vaporware, due to the uber-nerd L337 skillz to get it up and running. I had bad luck ever getting it to run back in the glory days of RedHat 6, 7 and 8, but now with the ease of apt-get in Ubuntu, Wine is preconfigured and precompiled via automatic updates. It's still a little shakey, but I've successfully been able to run quite a few programs that I thought would be doomed to a Windows partition.

Oh, and on the computer front, the 500gb harddrive I ordered on sunday should be here by the weekend (fingers crossed). At only $60 it was a steal! I'm looking forward towards giving Vista the ole' college try with 100gb partition. I'll post my travails in the Windows world once I start tinkering.

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