3 Wine is a program which allows running Microsoft Windows programs
4 (including DOS, Windows 3.x and Win32 executables) on Unix. It
5 consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft
6 Windows binary, and a library (called Winelib) that implements Windows
7 API calls using their Unix or X11 equivalents. The library may also
8 be used for porting Win32 code into native Unix executables.
10 Wine is free software, and its license (contained in the file LICENSE)
11 is BSD style. Basically, you can do anything with it except claim
16 Whenever you compile from source, it is recommended to use the Wine
17 Installer to build and install Wine. From the top-level directory
18 of the Wine source (which contains this file), run:
22 Run programs as "wine [options] program". For more information and
23 problem resolution, read the rest of this file, the Wine man page,
24 the files in the documentation directory of the Wine source
25 (see "DOCUMENTATION"), and especially the wealth of information
26 found at http://www.winehq.com.
30 To compile and run Wine, you must have one of the following:
32 Linux version 2.0.36 or above
33 FreeBSD 4.x or FreeBSD 5-CURRENT
34 Solaris x86 2.5 or later
38 Although Linux version 2.0.x will mostly work, certain features
39 (specifically LDT sharing) required for properly supporting Win32
40 threads were not implemented until kernel version 2.2. If you get
41 consistent thread-related crashes, you may want to upgrade to at least 2.2.
42 Also, some bugs were fixed and additional features were added
43 late in the Linux 2.0.x series, so if you have a very old Linux kernel,
44 you may want to upgrade to at least the latest 2.0.x release.
47 Make sure you have the USER_LDT, SYSVSHM, SYSVSEM, and SYSVMSG options
48 turned on in your kernel.
49 More information including patches for the 4-STABLE branch is in the
51 ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/ports/emulators/wine/files/
54 You will most likely need to build Wine with the GNU toolchain
55 (gcc, gas, etc.). Warning : installing gas does *not* ensure that it
56 will be used by gcc. Recompiling gcc after installing gas or
57 symlinking cc, as and ld to the gnu tools is said to be necessary.
60 Make sure you have the USER_LDT, SYSVSHM, SYSVSEM, and SYSVMSG options
61 turned on in your kernel.
64 Wine should run on most file systems. However, Wine will fail to start
65 if umsdos is used for the /tmp directory. A few compatibility problems have
66 also been reported using files accessed through Samba. Also, as NTFS
67 can only be used safely with readonly access for now, we recommend against
68 using NTFS, as Windows programs need write access almost everywhere.
69 In case of NTFS files, copy over to a writable location.
71 Wine requires kernel-level threads to run. Currently, only Linux
72 version 2.0 or later, FreeBSD-current or FreeBSD 3.0 or later,
73 Solaris x86 version 2.5 or later, and NetBSD-current are supported.
74 Other operating systems which support kernel threads may be supported
77 You need to have the X11 development include files installed
78 (called xlib6g-dev in Debian and XFree86-devel in RedHat).
79 To use Wine's support for multi-threaded applications, your X libraries
80 must be reentrant, which is probably the default by now.
81 If you have libc6 (glibc2), or you compiled the X libraries yourself,
82 they were probably compiled with the reentrant option enabled.
84 On x86 Systems gcc >= 2.7.2 is required.
85 Versions earlier than 2.7.2.3 may have problems when certain files
86 are compiled with optimization, often due to problems with header file
87 management. pgcc currently doesn't work with Wine. The cause of this problem
90 You also need flex version 2.5 or later and yacc.
91 Bison will work as a replacement for yacc. If you are
92 using RedHat or Debian, install the flex and bison packages.
94 For requirements in case you intend to build the documentation yourself,
95 see "DOCUMENTATION" section.
99 In case you chose to not use wineinstall, run the following commands
106 This will build the program "wine" and numerous support libraries/binaries.
107 The program "wine" will load and run Windows executables.
108 The library "libwine" ("Winelib") can be used to compile and link
109 Windows source code under Unix.
111 To see compile configuration options, do ./configure --help.
113 To upgrade to a new release by using a patch file, first cd to the
114 top-level directory of the release (the one containing this README
115 file). Then do a "make clean", and patch the release with:
117 gunzip -c patch-file | patch -p1
119 where "patch-file" is the name of the patch file (something like
120 Wine-yymmdd.diff.gz). You can then re-run "./configure", and then
121 run "make depend && make".
125 Once Wine has been built correctly, you can do "make install"; this
126 will install the wine executable, the Wine man page, and a few other
129 Don't forget to uninstall any conflicting previous Wine installation
130 first. Try either "dpkg -r wine" or "rpm -e wine" or "make uninstall"
133 If you want to read the documentation supplied with the Wine source,
134 see the "DOCUMENTATION" section.
136 Wine requires a configuration file named named "config" in your
137 ~/.wine directory. The format of this file is explained in the config file
138 man page (documentation/wine.conf.man).
139 The file documentation/samples/config contains an example configuration file
140 which has to be adapted and copied to the location mentioned above.
142 Don't forget to add vital registry entries by applying winedefault.reg
143 with programs/regapi/. See documentation/ directory for details.
145 See http://www.winehq.com/support.shtml for further configuration hints.
147 In case of library loading errors
148 (e.g. "Error while loading shared libraries: libntdll.so"), make sure
149 to add the library path to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig as root.
151 In order to verify the correctness of the environment you need for
152 Wine to run successfully, you may run "./tools/winecheck | less".
153 You'll get a percentage score indicating "Wine configuration correctness".
154 As this program is alpha, it doesn't run a truly thorough test yet, though,
155 so it should be taken as a first verification step only.
157 See wine.conf man page on how to switch to text mode only support if desired.
161 When invoking Wine, you may specify the entire path to the executable,
164 For example: to run Solitaire:
166 wine sol (using the searchpath to locate the file)
169 wine c:\\windows\\sol.exe (using a DOS filename)
171 wine /usr/windows/sol.exe (using a Unix filename)
173 Note: the path of the file will also be added to the path when
174 a full name is supplied on the commandline.
176 Wine is not yet complete, so several programs may crash. Provided you set up
177 winedbg correctly according to documentation/debugger.sgml, you will be dropped
178 into a debugger so that you can investigate and fix the problem.
179 For more information on how to do this, please read the file
180 documentation/debugging.sgml.
181 If you post a bug report, please read the file documentation/bugs.sgml to
182 see what information is required.
184 You should backup all your important files that you give Wine access
185 to, or use a special Wine copy of them, as there have been some cases
186 of users reporting file corruption. Do NOT run Explorer, for instance,
187 if you don't have a proper backup, as it renames/cripples several
188 directories sometimes. Not even other MS apps such as e.g. Messenger are safe,
189 as they launch Explorer somehow. This particular corruption (!$!$!$!$.pfr)
190 can at least partially be fixed by using
191 http://home.nexgo.de/andi.mohr/download/decorrupt_explorer
195 Some documentation (various Wine Guides etc.) can be found in the
196 documentation/ directory (apart from also being available on WineHQ).
198 If you want to process the SGML files in there, then you can run "make"
199 in the documentation/ directory.
200 Doing so requires the sgml tools package (for db2html, db2ps, db2pdf) named:
201 Debian: docbook-utils
202 Mandrake: sgml-tools-A.B.C-DDmdk
203 SuSE: docbktls-A.BB.C-DD
205 8. GETTING MORE INFORMATION
207 WWW: A great deal of information about Wine is available from WineHQ at
208 http://www.winehq.com/ : various Wine Guides, application database,
209 bug tracking. This is probably the best starting point.
211 FAQ: The Wine FAQ is located at http://www.winehq.com/FAQ
213 HOWTO: The Wine HOWTO (outdated !) is available at
214 http://www.westfalen.de/witch/wine-HOWTO.txt .
216 Usenet: The best place to get help or to report bugs is the Usenet newsgroup
217 comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine. Please read the file
218 documentation/bugs.sgml to see what information should be included
221 Please browse old messages on http://groups.google.com/ to check
222 whether your problem is already fixed before posting a bug report
225 IRC: Online help is available at channel #WineHQ on irc.openprojects.net.
227 CVS: The current Wine development tree is available through CVS.
228 Go to http://www.winehq.com/dev.shtml for more information.
231 There are several mailing lists for Wine developers; see
232 http://www.winehq.com/dev.shtml#ml for more information.
234 If you add something, or fix a bug, please send a patch (in 'diff -u'
235 format) to julliard@winehq.com or to the wine-patches@winehq.com
236 mailing list for inclusion in the next release.