I've been working a lot with Wine at the moment. No, that doesn't mean I've been getting sloshed at my desk at work. Actually for the last month or so I have been running Linux on my laptop - not dual booting - I've been using Linux as my sole operating system. Since time at work is divided 50/50 between Windows and Linux administration, I wondered it if might be helpful to administer Linux, from Linux, and I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of the OS. Since we use Red Hat only at work I've gone for CentOS 5.2 (for those that don't know, it's a very close clone of Red Hat) as my distro of choice.
I do still need to run Windows software though. I tried just using Citrix for my WIndows apps at first, but it became annoying after a while for various reasons - mainly copy and paste not working, and not being able to browse my own filesystem from the Citrix server, for say adding an attachment to a message.
Instead I am running Windows apps in Linux by using Wine (which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator). It's an open source implemtation of the Windows API that can run on Linux, Unix and Mac systems.
There are really 2 things that I want to mention in this post, and the first is winetricks. Presuming you have first installed Wine, using:
[lang="bash"]yum install wine[/lang]
Winetricks can can just be downloaded and run like this:
[lang="bash"]wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod 755 ./winetricks
./winetricks[/lang]
This presents you with a GTK menu where you can select the Windows apps you want installed. Winetricks then fetches the download and installs in your 'fake windows' for you. I found this especially handy for .NET Framework 2.0 and Windows Installer 2.0, which I wanted for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client. The VI Client then installed using Wine, but incidentally still would not run. Nonetheless winetricks is the best Wine helper-app I've seen so far.
winetricks
I can't say that I'm completely happy still, I've given up on Outlook 2007 as it was too buggy and am now using Office 2003, it is still a bit ropey in places (my preview window quite often breaks) but I guess I can work around the problems as they are not showstoppers. I've tried using Evolution as an open source alternative to Outlook, but being a guy why has used Outlook every day for many years, it seemed inferior in almost every way, and of course the integration with Exchange is never going to be as good as Microsoft's own Exchange client.
By the way if you're going to use Crossover Linux, I would use it exclusively for managing your Windows apps, rather than using Crossover, winetricks, and installing your own stuff just by running wine setup.exe. I found mixing and matching caused Office to become even more buggy than usual.
The second thing I wanted to mention is Codeweavers Crossover Linux. Wine is actually not difficult to use, but the general consensus on the Internet is it's not possible to get Outlook 2003/2007 working on Linux using Wine. This is where Crossover Linux steps in and makes it possible, and also makes it very easy to do so using a nice graphical interface. Crossover Linux is not free (usually it's $44), but I was lucky to get in there a few months back when they were giving it away free for a day.
