What is WINE?

WINE, in my opinion, is much like FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer. It is not an emulator, but (in the words of the developers) "...an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix." With Wine, you can run both simple and complex Windows programs and, unlike VMWare or Bochs, applications running under WINE use the CPU directly so that in some cases a Windows application may execute at the same speed or even faster under FreeBSD then it would under Windows. This, of course, isn't always what happens, but having a well supported video card along with a fast X server will greatly improve speed.

WINE includes a complete set of windows libraries, all open source. If you have a copy of Windows, and wish to use the Microsoft libraries, Wine will allow for that also. DirectX is also supported, if you are looking to use Wine to run some games (for example, both Starcraft and Half-Life will run under WINE).

Configuring WINE

I personally prefer to use the port, but feel free to use the package if you like. After building and installing WINE, you will need to recompile your kernel with the following line:

options USER_LDT

If you aren't sure how to do this, take a look at Chapter 7 of the FreeBSD Handbook. After installing, you will find a file called wine.conf.sample in /usr/local/etc. Copy it to /usr/local/etc/wine.conf, and open it in your favorite text editor. Using most of the defaults should be fine. There are lots of comments in the file, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out. If you wish to set up the floppy drive, you can do so (I didn't). I don't have a FAT partition on my drive, so I just set drive C: to /home/wintendos. If you have a real FAT partition, you can use that instead.

You can leave the file system type as win95. Inside the directory you set to drive C:, you will need to create \windows and \windows\system directories. If you have a FAT partition, you can use it instead.

My goal here is actually to get Blizzard's Starcraft going, so rather then setting drive D: to my actual CDROM drive, I set it to /home/CD, and then copied the files from the Starcraft CD to that directory. As long as the permissions are correct, it should work fine (at least it did for me). If you wish to use the native Windows DLLs, you can set that up inside wine.conf.

That's all I needed to do to wine.conf for my goals, feel free to read through wine.conf if you are looking to set some more options.

Now I just copied over my Starcraft directory from my Windows machine. I placed it in /home/wintendos/program files/starcraft. From there, I simply did:

% wine starcraft.exe

From within XFree86 4.X, you can run at any color depth or resolution. If you are using XFree86 3.X, you will need to be running at 8bit color. I found that at anything but 640x480x8 it was rather slow. I would assume this is because of my X server. Perhaps a commercial X server would be faster. The machine I'm using is a P2 300, 128M, with a 8M SiS6362 AGP graphics card. Once in 640x480x8, the game ran very well, with no problems that I noticed.

I also tested out a variety of other applications, and many of them worked. You can check to see what applications are supported by going to the WINE web site and searching for the application you wish to run.

- Moses

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