A Windows Free Zone - Using Macs, Linux, and Wine to escape the Microsoft money pit.

My primary workstation is a Mac. I love the Mac; it does almost everything I need. All of my writing, graphic arts, business management, and communication is handled elegantly and effortlessly on my Mac. Almost. There are only two things I need to do that I don't do on my Mac.

Windows-Only Software

I have a piece of software, a Library of documents, that unfortunately is produced only for Windows. I'm sure this will change eventually, but in the meantime I still need to access this library.

There are ways of doing this on my Mac. I could run VirtualBox or Parallels or VMware Fusion. I could use Bootcamp, built into Mac OS 10.5, to dual-boot my Mac.

However, all of those options require installing Windows on my Mac. As a Mac zealot, that's tantamount to sacrilege. Instead, I use Wine on my Linux workstation.

Wine is a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. That means that Wine, unlike VirtualBox or those other utilities, does not emulate Windows. Instead, it completely replaces Windows. It's a subtle distinction, I know, and for this discussion not of great significance. The important point is that with Wine you don't need to install Windows.

After installing OpenSuse 11, I installed Wine using Sues's admin tool Yast.

Then I simply inserted my library CD, opened up a terminal window, changed my working directory to the mounted CD, and typed

wine setup.exe

After that, there was no difference from running the program under Windows, except I didn't need to purchase a Windows license.

How does Wine accomplish this feat?

Windows is made up of a whole slew of dynamic link library files (DLLs,) and executable program files. Together, these constitute the Windows Application Programming Interface, or API. Wine replaces the Windows API with its own open source version licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License; it doesn't use any Microsoft code.

True, there are some Windows applications that won't run well or at all under Wine. But that list is getting smaller as Wine gets better. The application I need to run works just fine.

By the way, there is a commercial implementation of Wine available for the Mac, called CrossOver, produced by CodeWeavers. A search of its application database reveals that it too supports my Library program. CrossOver has some nice features contributing to ease of use, but since I'm comfortable with the Linux command line, Wine suits me just fine.

Web Non-Standards

I mentioned that there are two things I can't do with my Mac. The second is running Internet Explorer.

Microsoft it notorious for inventing their own standards, or taking existing standards and tweaking them. Since they have such gargantuan marketing clout, their standards eventually become industry standards.

Nevertheless, not everyone marches to the Microsoft drummer. In fact, even Microsoft doesn't always march to their own drummer; some of their own applications don't fully support their own standards.

Where this is readily apparent is in the world of web browsers. There are some sites that look and perform fine when viewed with a browser that supports the open standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www.w3.org/), but there are other sites that only work right under Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is because the developers of those sites have used non-standard code.

As well, IE will at times display even standards-compliant web sites differently than another browser. It's just a fact of life that if you're creating a web site, you need to test it in several different browsers, and even different versions of the same browser, to make sure it will work acceptably for all of your visitors. It would be foolish to just assume that since you're using IE, everyone else will too. Or since your site looks fine in Firefox or Safari, it will look exactly the same in IE.

So, when I'm editing my web sites, I fire up Windows and test the sites with Internet Explorer. To do this I run Windows XP under VirtualBox on my Linux workstation. And yes, I had to purchase a Windows license to do this legally.

Internet Explorer may work under Wine or CrossOver Mac; I haven't tried it. But since my purpose is to see how the site will look to real Windows users, the only way I can do so reliably is to run Windows. It's not my first choice, but sometimes you have to suffer for your art.

Otherwise, I'm proud to say I run a (mostly) Windows-free system.