Last Updated on: 25th December 2023, 12:56 pm
Web site: darwine.sourceforge.net
Category: Others
Platform: OS X, Darwin
License: GPL, LGPL
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: Darwine
First release: 2002
Darwine – a project which intends to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications. Currently Darwine consists in a Mac OS X port of Wine, which includes Xcode support, and Finder integration. You can download it here. The Darwine project aims to run Windows Application on Mac OS X, in the near future.
There are two major phases to this project.
The first phase is the port of Wine to Darwin/PowerPC with X11 (XFree86).
While the basic compatibility is there as Darwin is largely FreeBSD, there is the hurdle of its Mach kernel which uses the Mach-O format rather than ELF. This part has been achived with success. It means that WineLib is now working on Mac OS X, and that developers should be able to recompile their Win32 Apps using WineLib and make them work in Mac OS X.
The second phase is to then integrate in WINE the QEMU binary translator.
Additional supporting tools for launching Windows applications from the desktop and an integrated installer are desireable items for the package (like OpenOffice is doing).
This is distinguished from simply using QEMU to run Windows because there is no Windows here. Just WINE and QEMU to run Windows applications directly under X. That will enable vastly better performance, better integration, and easier administration.