Running Linux, Third Edition

Sharing Programs

The most popular non-Linux operating systems where compatibility is important—where people want to run its programs and files on Linux—are derivates of DOS: MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Novell DOS, and Windows 3.1 and later. You can use the Linux MTools package to search DOS filesystems, read and copy files, and write to a DOS filesystem. Still, compatibility with DOS obviously requires a lot more than handling a DOS filesystem.

There are two packages intended to provide Linux with the desired DOS compatibility. One is Dosemu and the other is Wine. We discuss them both in this chapter because of their importance to the Linux community.

It should be noted, though, that neither Dosemu nor Wine are finished products. While both development teams have made amazing progress, given the difficulty of their task, you should use them currently only if you are willing to fiddle around with them, trying to reconfigure things, and perhaps even trying to find and fix bugs. If you’d rather try a finished, commercial product, you can buy WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface) from Caldera, Inc., which is a port of the same product for Solaris and is quite stable, but it can run only Windows 3.1 programs.

Another remark: Two years ago, binary emulators like Dosemu and Wine were of utmost importance to the Linux community, because there was not much commercial software available. This situation has utterly changed, however. Many commercial software vendors are providing their products ...