With Wine, you can install and use most of your windows programs on your Asus EEE PC’s linux.

Wine (the acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a software working as a layer that makes running Windows applications on Linux possible.

One of the reasons I often hear why people install XP on the EEE is that they miss some windows applications and games. Well, we will see how a great quantity of windows program that can be installed and run from Linux through Wine.

Frank’s corner is a great resource about wine, you can find a list of working software. We can mention Photoshop CS, MS Office, or World of Warcraft for example.

How to install wine on the EEE

• Start the Synaptic packet manager: under Xandros you have to open the terminal (ctrl+t) and type sudo synaptic
• Search for Wine, check it, and apply changes.
• Another method would be to run the command sudo apt-get update from the terminal, followed by sudo apt-get install wine. Either way, you might have to add missing repositories

How to install applications through Wine

• Download your windows’ program setup file or insert your CD in an external drive. For the purpose of this article, I downloaded the setup file for the Opera browser for Windows (Opera_9.10_Eng_Setup.exe)
• Open the terminal and browse through to the folder containing the setup file. I had on my USB key, so the command was cd /media/disk
• Type wine Opera_9.10_Eng_Setup.exe and press enter. The installer will start and you can install the program just like you would under windows. So the pattern is wine name_of_the_installer.

Here is a short video showing the installation process

To start your program now, you have to get to the folder on the terminal (cd .wine/drive_c/Progr*/Opera), and type wine Opera.

To speed up the process of starting your windows app in the future, you can create a file in kwrite like the following one:

#/bin/sh
cd .wine/drive_c/Program*/Opera
wine Opera.exe

Save the file as Opera.sh and make it executable with the command chmod +x Opera.sh.

To start Opera, you will just have to run sh Opera.sh.