Wine (named in recursive fashion “Wine is not an emulator”) is used to run Windows applications on Linux; essentially, it interprets Windows commands for Linux and vice versa. I first met Wine in the form of Darwine (the “Dar” being for the underlying Darwin windowing technology in OSX), ported and maintained by Mike Kroneberg, and described at Low End Mac in an article by Alan Zisman. An alternative approach to installing wine, which I have not explored, is to install Wine via MacPorts.

The utility of Wine is that it does not require one to partition the hard drive, reboot, or to own and run any version of Windows. I have a full installation of Windows Vista Pro running on Parallels, but for certain lightweight, self-contained programs, I can launch Darwine and be running in a quarter of the time it takes for Parallels and then Vista to lumber into motion. WinBUGS, which I’ve been learning for Bayesian analysis, runs quite happily on Darwine, although I had to install by downloading and unpacking a zip file (per instructions for Vista or 64 bit systems), as the installer itself gave an error. After that, about the only tricky part was figuring out the file structure of the pseudo-C drive and how to access the files on the Mac, since they’re in an invisible folder. FirstBayes (Bayesian learning software) did not run, even after I figured out how to do the required registry hack, but then FirstBayes didn’t care much for Vista, either. Notepad++ runs without any trouble, as does Plant Studio (an old Windows program for building 3D plant models). Here is the official application database, rather games-heavy.

Darwine is no longer being developed, but its successor, now named Wine, is still in development. As my copy of Darwine survived beyond the Snow Leopard Event Horizon and still does what I need it to do, I will upgrade later.