Getting Started with Wine on Mac OS X

Whilst there's a couple of excellent, paid-for, virtualization options around for OS X (Parallels and VMware), they can be a little heavy-handed if you only need to run one or two applications. Not to mention the price of a virtualization application as well as the necessary Windows licence can make it an expensive purchase! Of course, there's Boot Camp, but that also requires a Windows license. But there's is an alternative: the free and open-source Wine project. Wine allows you to run Windows applications within Mac OS X without either a Windows licence or virtualisation application -- though not every application will work.

As Wine's not the easiest thing to install, this handy guide is available to walk you through the setup and configuration. You'll need to be comfortable in the Terminal to make the most of the tutorial, but if that's not too big a challenge, a little Terminal-fu is a small investment for begrudgingly running the odd Windows app.

[Photo by kcdsTM]

Tags: open source, OpenSource, Virtualisation, Virtualization, Windows on Mac, WindowsOnMac, Wine