Wine
Wine makes Linux "pose" as Windows. Unlike VMWare, Xen and others which pretend to be a computer, on which you then run the real Microsoft Windows as you would on a physical machine, Wine instead just pretends to be Windows, by offering applications the Windows API and functions they use, and mapping them to the corresponding Linux API.
Given that Wine pretends to be Windows, and Windows is complex and convoluted, this posing works only to a certain degree, and varies a lot depending on which Windows application you use, which functions it uses and how complete the Wine implementation is. You can check the Wine Application Database for other people's experiences with your application. Both regular office apps and games are supported by the standard Open-Source Wine shipped with openSUSE. There are also some non-free versions of Wine which support other applications.
Use
Of course, Wine needs to be installed, see Repositories below.
To use the Windows program, first Linux needs to have access to it. The preferred (more reliable and secure) way is to install it from the Windows program's installation CD, by running the setup.exe with Wine, i.e. when openSUSE recognizes the inserted CD and opens it in Konqueror, you just click on setup.exe.
By default, the emulated drive C: will be a directory on the Linux partition, and you can install your program there. You don't need to have Microsoft Windows installed nor to access any possibly existing Windows partition.
Afterwards, you start the program via one of the ways listed below.
From Konqueror/Nautilus
You should be able to just click on a Windows .exe file in your file manager (e.g. Konqueror). That should start the program in Wine (TODO verify common file managers).
CDs that you insert should appear under /media/, and the C: drive in Wine is mapped by default to ~/.wine/drive_c/ - paste that in your Konqueror address bar and make a bookmark.
From shell
If you open a terminal (e.g. Konsole or Gnome Terminal), you can also type wine "/media/dvd/setup.exe" or wine "/media/c/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe", where the italics part is the path to the program you want to start, and it depends on your system and your application. The quotes are needed if you have spaces in the pathname.
Most Windows programs will create menu and desktop entries during their installation and these will show up in either the GNOME or KDE start menus somewhere.
If you want to have an entry for the program in your start / KDE / SuSE menu, you can open the menu folder where want to place it, then click the right mouse button for the context menu, and select "Edit menu". You should see an application "KDE menu editor" opening. Click File | New element..., enter a name and description for it, and enter as "command" the same command as described under "From shell" above. Test the command in a shell first before adding it to the menu.
Commercial Wine versions
You can just install the Open-Source Wine for SUSE - see below. There is also a commercial product based to a large part on Wine: Crossover Office. It has made changes to Wine to improve the execution of some specific applications on which they concentrate. You should check their list of supported applications.
Crossover Office (from CodeWeavers) supports use of some office software like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop on Linux. See the Compatibility list. There also is Crossover Games focusing on games.
Repositories
WINE is available for all openSUSE versions on the standard installation.
Up to date Wine RPMs are available from:
Version: Tumbleweed
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/
Version: Leap 15.5
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/15.5/
Version: Leap 15.6
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/15.6/
Above URLs provide both "YUM" and old style "YAST" repositories and can be added by the YAST Installation Sources module, zypper or smart.
Following packages are available:
- wine: Builds of the biweekly WINE snapshot releases. This is the recommended version for most users.
- wine-staging: Builds of Wine + Staging patchset, which brings lot of experimental improvements that are prepared for the regular Wine.
- wine-snapshot: Daily builds of the current WINE GIT state. Only for the experienced user, can potentially be broken!
The SUSE Wine packages are maintained by Marcus, here to send e-mail
Utilities
winetricks
Winetricks a small shell program which is included in the above packages. Just start winetricks.
It will open a dialog offering to automatically download and install various common programs like Win32 Firefox,
Apple QuickTime / iTunes, multimedia codecs, various truetype fonts, and also helper runtime dlls like the Visual C runtimes.
The snapshot packages always contain the latest winetricks, a description can be found here.
Wine Doors
Wine Doors is a menu driven installer for standard Windows components, with option of downloading components.
Wine Doors is in the wine-doors package in above repositories.
Internet Explorer on Wine
As a frequently asked question, how to install Internet Explorer on Wine ...
Run:
(for IE 6) or
(for IE7).
(In former times there was a tool called "ies4linux", but this script is not maintained nor working anymore with current Wine.)
Picasa
Google Labs ported the Picasa2 photo organizer through its own implementation of Wine.
This installation is now deprecated, one could instead install Picasa 3.9 thorough Wine. In this case it appears that Internet Explorer 6 should be installed, in order to have full functionality in Linux.
Source
The possibility to install from source is also an option. This is usually needed only if you are debugging Wine, or if you want to compile an older separate version of wine for different programs.
Building on x86 (32bit)
Necessary RPM: gcc, make, flex, bison, ncurses-devel, giflib-devel, liblcms-devel, libxslt-devel, Mesa-devel, libpng-devel, libxml2-devel, freeglut-devel, zlib-devel, glibc-devel, fontconfig-devel, xorg-x11-devel, libjpeg-devel, unixODBC-devel, freetype2-devel, openssl-devel, openldap2-devel
Configure:
64-bit
Necessary RPM: gcc, make, flex, bison, ncurses-devel-32bit, giflib-devel-32bit, liblcms-devel-32bit, libxslt-devel-32bit, Mesa-devel-32bit, libpng-devel-32bit, libxml2-devel-32bit, freeglut-devel-32bit, zlib-devel-32bit, glibc-devel-32bit, fontconfig-devel-32bit, xorg-x11-devel-32bit, xorg-x11-libXext-32bit, xorg-x11-libXp-32bit, xorg-x11-libXt-32bit, capi4linux-32bit, xorg-x11-libICE-32bit, xorg-x11-libXext-devel-32bit, sane-32bit, cups-libs-32bit, libjpeg-devel-32bit, unixODBC-devel-32bit, freetype2-devel-32bit, openssl-devel-32bit, openldap2-devel-32bit, freetype2-devel-32bit, hal-32bit, hal-devel,
Configure:
Configuration
Wine is configured by typing winecfg on the command line. This will map all drives for wine and create a .wine on your home folder the first time it's run and then open the Wine configuration dialog. It's recommended that you eject all removable drives before running winecfg as these may confuse the installation.
The file user.reg inside the .wine folder controls wine's appearance.
Here is a "How to" by minio that shows how to make wine look more like the GTK industrial theme: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=55286
Sometimes, an application can depend on a Windows font that is not directly available by wine; it will then use to alphabetically the first font available, which might be some obscure fixed-space font, hebrew font or something. Try to
in case you hit this problem.
Configuration of Windows programs
If you run Wine from a terminal command line you will get an idea of how often calls are failing, even when the program runs.
Check http://bugs.winehq.org/ for solutions.
Wine Doors might help as you can load some extra microsoft dlls but will change the configuration quite markedly.
ChemSketch
ChemSketch (version 12 and before) has a windowing bug which means set up is slightly challenging, although it may seem to have worked fine the first time on a KDE session. After this ChemSketch and associated programs are unusable with a hidden window unless you take the steps in SDB:ChemSketch with wine.