I''m not that familiar with the workings of WINE, but does anyone have any thoughts on this? I mean, if a program runs in WINE and tries to do something nasty to the hard disk or install spyware, you''ll get an error. If a program runs without problem in WINE it should be safe to use in windows right? From what I''ve seen of WINE, very few programs would survive such a test, but this might become more important if things improve... Tom

so what is wine?

WINE lets you run some Windows applications on Linux. Unlike an emulator, it actually simulates the Windows environment instead of running it in the background. I have never used it, but it is supposed to be very good, because you don''t need Windows and it doesn''t kill lots of memory. I saw an article on it in OSDN about a week ago.

Scott Simontis
e-mail:ageofscott@comcast.net
AIM:ssimontis

This is theoretically possible. I do see some issues which may poke some serious holes into using Wine this way.

1) The Wine project aims to provide a reverse engineered port of the Windows APIs on Linux (perhaps other Unices, but not sure). A perfect port would mean it would allow Win32 programs to run just as if they were on a Windows box. This would also allow spyware programs to be installed "behind the scenes".

2) Some viruses already run under Wine. One of the big ones ( in terms of spreading - I think it was Nimda, could be wrong) was seen to run under wine. The virus did not do any damage to the Linux box, but it did propigate using the Linux box and Wine. (IIRC).


I wouldn't trust Wine for this purpose yet. I also wouldn't trust it until the developers said they put in anti-virus protection. Then I still wouldn't trust it for this purpose until it was extensively tested. After that, I'd run backup software on a very regular basis

Disclaimer: I have not run Wine extensively, but I have used it to run Word97, and I sat in on a seminar given by one of the main Crossover Office programmers at my LUG. Crossover is a commerical company that enhances Wine and sells them as an "easy to use" product.





[edited by - debaere on November 23, 2003 9:14:34 AM]

I''d like to note that even though this is highly inmpossible it is possible, a virus writer could use native linux calls and do domage to your system(or anything the current user has access to). The reason being is wine is not a VM.

Virii don''t do much under wine, mostly cause they can''t edit the startup, and have a hard time accessing your linux partitian, plus it''s limited to your use permissions on linux so really, there''s not much to fear from wine..