Monday, August 23, 2010

Running Windows Programs

We have several options for running Windows-only programs in Ubuntu. For some reason we used one of these :

  1. Find Linux equivalents for those programs.
  2. Run the native Windows program using Wine.
  3. Run the native Windows program using Crossover Office8 or Cedega.9
  4. Dual boot.
  5. Run an emulator.
For the first one, you can usually find some good guides if you do a Google search
for the keywords linux equivalents windows programs.
The third you'll have to pay for, but I hear good things about these programs.
I don't know how to do the fifth, and I've already provided a link to the fourth.
A bit about Wine... I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work with a lot
of simple Windows programs. I'll show you how I get Filezilla to work in Linux, as
an example.

Assuming I've already enabled extra repositories, first, I install Wine:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

Then, I download the setup.exe file for Filezilla. When I double-click on it, Wine will
try to open the file. Then, the installer appears, just as if I were using Windows.
Instead of installing Filezilla to C:\Program Files\Filezilla\, I'm going to override the
default installation location and install it to
z:\home\username\.wine\drive_c\Program Files\Filezilla. For some reason, z:\ is
what Wine calls my Ubuntu partition.
Then, I set up a launcher (on the panel or in the menu) for the command wine
“z:\home\username\.wine\drive_c\Program Files\Filezilla\Filezilla.exe”
That's it. Now when I click on that launcher, Filezilla will load up.
If a Windows program does not work with Wine, you may need Crossover Office.
Cedega is a special version of Wine that's made for Windows-only games.

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