[Linux-ham] Shackbox LiveDVD

[Alan Porter]

> The Windows software is an interesting addition. If they are running
> under Wine, you would definitely need a bit of memory and a faster
> processor. Emulation does not exactly improve performance.

Wine is not an emulator (in fact, I think it even stands for that
W-I-N-E).  It is a loader and a set of shared libraries that implement
the Win32 API using Linux calls.  That is, when someone calls
Win32OpenFileSomething(), it links to a function that actually opens the
files using Linux calls.  Some of these are low-level calls directly
from glibc, while others are nice window-ish dialog boxes written in
X-window primitives.  A good example of this is the "File / Open" dialog
box that you see in almost every Windows app.  WINE provides a "File /
Open" dialog box that happens to know how to navigate your home
directory, follow symlinks, and other Linux-ish things.

So... WINE will not be as slow as a CPU emulator, such as Qemu, which is
probably what you were thinking of.

Alan





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