Darwine


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Looking at their sourceforge site makes it look like this is a pretty new project. If they can get this working with about as much support as WINE has now on linux systems then I'd consider buying a boxed copy or a half-dozen t-shirts or something. I don't really care for direct x support (but I wouldn't complain), but being able to run all those dumpy windows-only applications that you encounter would be godsend.

Like Tim I'm still more hyped about the kOffice port, but this is a close second.

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It has along way to go, with the current support they have (3 developers) they'd get some decent results in 2-3 years time.

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Apple should invest into this like they did KHTML... KHTML was quite far into it's development and this isn't, but if they got it to work, it would be awesome. Natively (well, through X11) run those pesky Windows applications that don't have OS X versions yet.

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If they could, Mac OS X would be the most compaitble system there is to date. Windows, linux, unix and everything else under the sun :)

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dont know too much about OS X but since from my understanding couldnt you just run wine since its a linux dealio and OSX runs linux programs or errr is there something more to it that im missing :unsure:

Edited by divertom15
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Divertom15:

Wine is a re-implimentation of Windows libraries/functions/etc so that you can run Windows binaries on *NIX systems. If certain libraries haven't been ported then you can actually use files from a windows installation to get that functionality.

All that is great except for one thing: you're dealing with binaries -> compiled programs that are designed to run on an x86 processor. All modern macintosh systems use PowerPC processors which are not compatible with the x86 instruction set. What you would need is a way to translate the x86 instructions to (an) equivalent PPC instruction(s) as the program runs or an x86 emulator running below WINE.

You could install something like VirtualPC and then run linux, and then run WINE but then you might as well just install Windows on VPC and be done with it.

This project is particularly interesting because the programs running in WINE run right along side the other Mac OS X, Classic, and X11 applications: they're not trapped inside an emulation window.

Hope that clears things up a little.

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@the evn show : duh! thats what i forgot the dirrence in the cpu architechture. if i woulda remebered that i wouldnt have asked a dumb question like that . Thanks :)

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Actually, they are getting some emulation going, only it's more transparent. They're kind of turning it from WINE to WIE. :p

I kinda figured they were running above an emulator (EDIT: yes, they're using bochs). IMO this could be the next best thing to rootless virtual pc. Now all they need is a recursive acronym:

DARWINE: Darwine actually runs windows in nifty emulation?

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Now they just need some mac programmers as contributors to the bochs project to work on G4 and G5 optimizations to the emulator code. Perhaps they could look at some kind of JIT to convert between Intel and PPC machine code. Also, an emulation layer between the gfx card and emulator would be cool too.

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Bochs and VirtualPC will always be a better solution for running the apps that there's no OSX substitute for...

And Bochs is free as well...

I'm going to guess this will be a lot better than that...

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This is going to make use of bochs to run native Windows apps (like Office) directly on OSX. It's required to use emulation, because they can't compile Office from source. They only have those demo applications running becuase the source is available.

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This is going to make use of bochs to run native Windows apps (like Office) directly on OSX. It's required to use emulation, because they can't compile Office from source. They only have those demo applications running becuase the source is available.

Why would you run Microsoft Office for Windows using Wine on a platform that has a native version that costs the same, is going to run better and includes Virtual PC for the same cost...

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