There are many ways to run software other than through Wine. If
you are considering using Wine to run an application you might
want to think about the viability of these approaches if you
encounter difficulty.
Instead of running a particular Windows application with Wine,
one frequently viable alternative is to simply run a different
application. Many Windows applications, particularly more
commonly used ones such as media players, instant messengers,
and filesharing programs have very good open source equivalents.
Furthermore, a sizable number of Windows programs have been
ported to Linux directly, eliminating the need for Wine (or
Windows) entirely.
Probably the most obvious method of getting a Windows
application to run is to simply run it on Windows. However,
security, license cost, backward-compatibility, and machine
efficiency issues can make this a difficult proposition, which
is why Wine is so useful in the first place.
Another alternative is to use ReactOS, which is a fully
open source alternative to Windows. ReactOS shares code
heavily with the Wine project, but rather than running Windows
applications on top of Linux they are instead run on top of the
ReactOS kernel. ReactOS also offers compatibility with Windows
driver files, allowing the use of hardware without functional
Linux drivers.
Rather than installing an entirely new operating system on your
machine, you can instead run a virtual machine at the software
level and install a different operating system on it. Thus, you
could run a Linux system and at the same time run Windows along
with your application in a virtual machine simultaneously on the
same hardware. Virtual machines allow you to install and run
not only different versions of Windows on the same hardware, but
also other operating systems, including ReactOS.
There are several different virtual machine offerings out there,
and some are also able to emulate x86 hardware on different
platforms. The open source Bochs and QEMU can run
both Windows and ReactOS virtually. Other, commercial virtual
machine offerings include VMware and Microsoft's
VirtualPC.
There are significant drawbacks to using virtual machines,
however. Unlike Wine, such programs are
emulators, so there is an inevitable speed decrease which can
be quite substantial. Furthermore, running an application
inside a virtual machine prevents fully integrating the
application within the current environment. You won't, for
example, be able to have windows system tray icons or program
shortcuts sitting alongside your desktop Linux ones, since
instead the Windows applications must reside completely within
the virtual machine.
