Wine is being developed specifically to run on the Intel x86 class of CPUs under certain Unixes that run on the x86 platform. Unixes currently being tested for Wine compatibility include Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD. The Wine development team hopes to attract the interest of commercial Unix and Unix clone vendors as well.
Wine is currently being developed specifically for use on Intel x86 CPUs, and needs a minimum 80386 CPU. It is known to also work in the 80486 and Pentium CPUs. Beyond that, the basic test is, if you can run X11 now, you should be able to run Wine and MS Windows applications. As always, the faster your CPU, the better. Having a math coprocessor is unimportant. However, having a graphics accelerated video card supported by X will help greatly.
It is anticipated that when Wine is completed, you will need approximately 6-8 megabytes of hard drive space to store and compile the source code.
If you can run X smoothly on your Unix system now, you should be able to run Wine and MS Windows applications just fine too. A Wine workstation should realistically have at least 8 megabytes of RAM and a 12 megabyte swap partition. More is better, of course.
Only if the operating system supports mounting those types of drives. Currently, NetBSD and FreeBSD do not. However, there is a patch for the Linux kernel that allows read-only access to a Doublespaced DOS partition, and it's available on sunsite.unc.edu as:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Filesystems/thsfs.tgz
You do not need DOS or MS Windows to install, configure and run Wine. However, Wine has to be able to 'see' an MS Windows binary if it is to run it. So, currently, you do need to have a DOS partition with MS Windows installed on your hard drive to use Wine in a practical manner. Your Unix OS must be able to 'see' this partition (check your /etc/fstab file or mount the partition manually) in order for Wine to run MS Windows binaries in your DOS partition.
However, when it is finished, Wine will not require that you have a MS-DOS partition on your system at all, meaning that you will not need to have MS Windows installed either. Wine programmers will provide an application setup program to allow you to install your MS Windows programs straight from your distribution diskettes into your Unix filesystem, or from within your Unix filesystem if you ftp an MS Windows program over the Internet.
Most of them, yes. However, some applications and aplets that come with MS Windows, such as File Manager and Calculator, can be considered by some to be redundant, since 32-bit Unix programs that duplicate these functions already exist.
Wine is written to be filesystem independent, so MS Windows applications will install and run under any filesystem supported by your brand of Unix.
Being a GUI (graphical user interface), MS Windows does not have a character mode, so there will be no character mode for Wine. So yes, you must run Wine under X.
Wine is window manager independent, so the X window manager you choose to run has absolutely no bearing on your ability to run MS Windows programs under Wine. Wine uses standard X libraries, so no additional ones are needed.
Wine developers do eventually plan on supporting Win32s, but such support is not in the current version of Wine.
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