Installing Popular Windows Software in Ubuntu
If you’ve hip to the world of Linux, you’ve probably heard of a program called Wine. It’s used to simulate a Windows environment, allowing Windows-oriented software to run inside of Linux. However, in almost all scenarios, getting Windows software to run using Wine was a serious pain in the ass, or wouldn’t work at all. Fortunately, things have come a very long way and installing many popular Windows based software has become simple.
So how do we make this easy? Instead of using just Wine by itself, we’re going to use a program that takes care of installing Wine AND installing/configuring the Windows software you want to install. This program is called Wine-Doors, and it works similarly to Synaptic Package Manager, or the simpler Add/Remove software applet found in Ubuntu Linux.
To install this software in Ubuntu, all you have to do is download this deb file (be sure to SAVE IT to your desktop or some place more permanent) and then double-click on it to run it. Wine-Doors will then install with just a couple clicks of the mouse. Once Wine-Doors is installed, you can delete the deb file.
I tried this software out recently and was able to install things like Internet Explorer 6, Quicktime, DirectX 9, Steam (Valve Software), and a whole lot more. (By the way, SHAME on Valve for disabling my account because I didn’t log into it for a year. I paid them 60 bucks for my silver copy of Half-Life2 and they just yanked it and every other game I paid for because I didn’t feel like playing video games. What cruel punishment!)
Before I end this, I just wanted to mention that a recent update of Wine just came out, enabling testers and developers to get Adobe Photoshop to run on top of Ubuntu! This will no doubt be integrated into Wine-Doors very soon. I should also quickly remind everyone that Wine is continually progressing, so there are a large number of apps out there that Wine can’t run stable just yet. In the mean time, you can use Wine-Doors to download apps that have been tested a great deal and show high stability. Now if they could only get Adobe After Effects to work on it, I’d never need to use Windows for anything again…
Saturday, January 26th, 2008