Wine is Not the Only Fruit
Many people have heared about Wine - which describes itself as follows:Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.
Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.
Less well-known, though is FreeDOS, which does something similar for MS-DOS. This project has been going for ages (there's a good history here), and now it seems almost done. Quite whether the world needs an MS-DOS clone is another matter, but it's good to see it reaching fruition.
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2 comments:
Big difference here: Wine is an API, which lets you use your current operating system (be it Linux, OSX/Intel, etc) to run programs written for 'Doze. FreeDOS is a complete operating system; it's to MSDOS what Linux is to Unix.
You're right, of course. But I did say "which does something similar for MS-DOS" - which was meant to cover this vaguely.
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