Darwine - FAQ

Table of Content:

What is the goal of Darwine?
How can I help?
What is the targeted audience?
Is the Darwin/Mac OS X release of Wine currently able to run Windows executable (.exe)?
I am having trouble while launching Wine: I get an error "failed to initialize: dlcompat: dyld: wine Undefined symbols:_DllMain".
What is going on with the Apple Decision to Switch to Intel?
Where can I find an FAQ about Wine?

The Darwine project 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. 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.

How can I help?

First join the mailing list darwine-devel and see the todo section of the site to get an idea of what can be done. We are especially looking for developers, skilled or not, but any kind of help is welcomed.

What is the targeted audience?

Currently the targeted audience is Developers or Hackers. Users are discouraged from running Darwine because it is still undergoing improvements on Mac OS X, and there is still much to do.

Is the Darwin/Mac OS X release of Wine currently able to run Windows executable (.exe)?

No. We are currently working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 a Win32 .exe should run within wine with a limited effort.

I am having trouble while launching Wine: I get an error "failed to initialize: dlcompat: dyld: wine Undefined symbols:_DllMain".

It means that you forgot to do set the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to 10.3 while compiling Wine. You will have to do:

> cd /path/to/wine
> make clean
> export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3
> make

What is going on with the Apple Decision to Switch to Intel?

It means that Wine will run with much less effort on those Intel Mac that on the PowerPC Mac. We have already been working on the Mac OS X/x86 support, but we are not able to test it right now. If someone with OpenDarwin/x86 running can give a try to the compilation process, and the running process, we are interested about his feedback. Report it on the darwine-devel Mailing list

However qemu-darwin-user (which allows Mac OS X/x86 applications to run on Mac OS X/PPC) is still under work, see the Developer Documentation for more help on how to hack on qemu-darwin-user.

What is going on with the Apple Decision to Switch to Intel?

For more FAQ on Wine, you can also read WineHQ's FAQ.