my unix

In the Mid 90’s, Sun had a product called Wabi which implemented the Windows API on top of Solaris or as the manual put’s it “The Wabi(TM) program is a UNIX(R) application that enables you to run Microsoft Windows applications on several UNIX operating environments that use the X Window System“.

It’s been a long time since and Wabi met it’s end, over 10 years ago in fact – since then the Wine Project have picked up the batton and run with it. Wine recently released a release candidate to finally take Wine to release 1.0, after 15 years!

A lot of people have things they wish were done in indiana and Windows application support is right up the top of my list. No doubt some people will kindly point out that this blog post tells me how to compile it using CBE and Sun studio. Although I can spend the time doing this it’s not exactly an intuitive path and I most certainly would not recommend OpenSolaris as a desktop platform if this was the case (and yes some will argue with me as to whether Solaris is a desktop platform, but i will kindly point that there are lots of people using Sun Ray’s, Ultra XX’s and so on).

And I’m not picking just on OpenSolaris here, I am yet to see any platform – Linux, BSD or otherwise that makes running Wine applications simple. This is where I must commend the work of Karl Lattimer and his Wine-Doors project:

Wine-doors is essentially a package manager for Windows applications running on Wine, it utilises the existing model that is used on both Linux and Unix systems (APT, YUM, IPS) with a Synaptic like GUI.

Although Wine-Doors is produced for Linux Karl has expressed an interest in providing a build for OpenSolaris (Indiana), the only problem being that we don’t have a current version of Wine packaged for Indiana.

If we can get a well polished Wine-Doors running on Indiana, as well as fixing up the few other issues (DVD, Codecs etc.) we would be well placed as an alternative to Windows.

I am not too sure if wine poses a submarine patent risk for vendors that ship it but it would be great to see Sun have another go at running Windows applications on Solaris, it would definitely make the Sun Ray a much more exciting commercial offering.

Pretty isn’t it!