Wine

[Luke -Jr]

On Wednesday 09 May 2007 10:34, Billy Crook wrote:
> Wine is Windows Emulation. 

WINE = WINE Is *Not* an Emulator

> It lets you run most windows programs in Linux. 

But not via emulation. WINE implements the Win32 APIs on top of an X11/POSIX 
system. As a result, programs run natively and sometimes even faster than on 
a Windows OS.
For example, WINE provides gdi32.dll.so, a native shared library that 
implements the functions provided by Windows's gdi32.dll.
The "wine" binary merely does 3 simple things:
1. reads the PE executable format and loads the code into memory (this *could*
    be done by Linux, just like it reads ELF/a.out formats)
2. loads the dynamicly linked .so libraries based on the PE (equivalent of
    ld.so?)
3. Executes the newly loaded program and, if not running, some daemons (which
    handle things like Win32 IPC; in theory, this case could be replaced with
    dbus wrappers).