so after reading the subject of this blog, how many of you thought that i was talking about the alcoholic beverage, wine? if so, then you just don’t know me at all! no, i’m not talking about wine with grapes, i’m talking about the open source project wine.

my old laptop has been having some issues with memory leaks. i’m not sure why the windows xp install i had was leaking memory, but i was running out of virtual memory all the time even if it was just idling! i decided that it might be time for me to try the hackintosh route again, but i remembered all of the hassle that it took for me to get there and decided to try something else.

just for fun, i decided to try fedora again. yes, on the eve of fedora core 11, i decided to install fc10. i haven’t run some flavor of linux as a primary OS on a laptop in a long time and it’s pretty impressive to see just how far the linux user community has come along.

there are a couple of things that have always prevented me from running linux as my primary OS: poor application support and hardware support

poor application support:
some of the most important tools for me only exist in windows. it’s unfortunate because it is these tools that tie me to windows. my favorite mysql browser is SQLyog. it only runs on windows, so when i was working on a mac, i previously fired up a VM just to run SQLyog. that required firing up a VM, installing windows, updating it, and then installing the app. for good measure, i installed anti-virus software too. it’s a lot of overhead to run an application or two.

the other must have app is office. i just can’t get around it. sometimes you just need the office suite and there’s nothing you can do about it.

i really do like PSPad as my notepad, but i can live without it if i have to.

but the one app that i really would love to have with me is photoshop. there are PC and mac versions, but still the closest thing to it on linux is gimp. and let me tell you, gimp is still a far, far cry from photoshop. it’s pretty amazing how far along open source software has come, but in the arena of user applications, it’s still weak.

so bearing all that in mind, i was prepared to install a VM with windows for these apps. i know that it won’t be great, but it ought to be serviceable. and that’s when i it hit me…i wonder how the wine project was doing. Wine Is Not an Emulator.

Out of the box, wine ran sqlyog, pspad, and microsoft office just fine. i hear that it also runs photoshop fine, but i haven’t tried an install yet. this is a huge, huge win in my book for linux. not only do i get to run linux and have the linux console around with me, but if i have access to my favorite apps without having to run a full blown out VM, that’s fantastic!

AND wine runs on not just linux, but the mac too, so if i ever go back to the mac, i think that i will definitely give wine a try and see if i can get it to work. getting access to some of my favorite windows programs is a huge win for me.