my unix

For what seems like forever using Wine (The Windows compatability layer) on Solaris was an absolute pain. There was once a time when you had to compile it by hand, then Vit Hrachovy & Apostolos Syropoulos & Albert Lee started producing SVR4 packages that made installing as easy as “pkgadd -d winepackage”.

Since then Brandon Barker has pushed the latest stable release of Wine into the contrib IPS repository which integrates well with the new software management architecture for OpenSolaris.

By itself Wine is very usable but you need a fair amount of expertise or lots of time to get your favourite Windows application running correctly. This is why we have companies like Bordeaux Group and CodeWeavers who sell commercially supported Wine version or management tools that make our lives a little easier.

To give you an idea of how easy it is I am just going to focus on how easy Bordeaux 1.8.2 makes it to get MS Office 2003 up and running.

Installing Bordeaux:

Once you have added the “contrib” repository to your OpenSolaris sytem by typing:

pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/ contrib

You can install Wine by simply typing

pfexec pkg install wine

This will pull in Wine and all the other packages that support it.

After doing this you can run the Bordeaux installer by typing:

./bordeaux-solaris.x86.sh

You should then be able to see the new Bordeaux sub-menu in your Applications Menu:

Installing MS Office

In the Bordeaux menu when you select “Install Windows Applications” you are presented with a list of supported Windows Applications, from here I selected Microsoft Office 2003. Bordeaux then goes and fetches all of the necessary supporting components (MSXML etc…) and installs them all for you, following that you are asked to point the installer at the installer exe for Microsoft Office which you may have on a DVD disk or stored on your drive. Once you select the installer you simply go through the normal installation process, entering your product key and so on.

Running MS Office

MS Office looks exactly the same and performs just as well on Wine as it does in Windows, Wine is not emulating Windows or running an entire Windows session like other solutions such as VMWare or VirtualBox…this is the Windows API on top of Solaris:

Using the entire Office suite I had absolutely no problems, the Windows Documents directory was mapped to my user home directory in Solaris and after a few hours use I didn’t manage to make anything crash or stall. I wish that my work laptop that runs Windows was this stable!

What’s happening in the future?

According to Tom Wickline, the founder of Bordeaux, the future release of Bordeaux will integrate it’s own distribution of Wine rather than relying on the stable one in the contrib repository. This is a fantastic idea as the Wine codebase is constantly being improved and extended to support not just new software but updates and service packs to existing products. The updated Wine version should enable Bordeaux to support Office 2007 as well as later version of Adobes Creative suite, and other popular software packages. For a list of supported packages in this release head on over to the product page and check out what is on offer.

Wine is a software package that I track very closely, I view it as critical to the success of Unix and Linux desktops, as this product eveolves I will post new information here, maybe for the next release we can get Tom Wickline to do an interview to tell us a bit more about the product and where he see’s OpenSolaris as desktop platform in the future.