Darwine

Darwine was a port of the Wine libraries to Darwin and Mac OS X (the Wine project provides source code for OS X but not binary builds). The Darwine project intended to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that would allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications and to provide a Win32 API compatibility at application source code level.[1]

Darwine
Developer(s)Darwine Project
Stable release
1.0.1 / 2008-10-24
Preview release
1.5.22 / 2013-01-26
Operating systemMac OS X, Darwin
PlatformPowerPC, IA-32
TypeCompatibility layer
LicenseGPL, LGPL
Websitedarwine.sourceforge.net

Darwine is a free and open source software application that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Mac OS X operating systems. Darwine was developed from Wine which performed these functions on other Unix and Linux operating systems. Darwine also provided a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.

History

In 2002, part of the OpenDarwin team created Darwine to support compiling of Win32 source into Mach-O/PowerPC binaries for Macintosh computers. The group succeeded in porting Wine from ELF to Mach-0 Mach-O/PowerPC. The developers then worked to integrate the processor-emulator QEMU with a Mac OS-compatible version of Wine in order to run Win32 EXEs on Mac OS X for PowerPC.

Darwine's focus shifted due to the Mac transition to Intel processors. Darwine applied their patches to Wine for a separate x86 Macintosh version of Darwine. x86 Macintosh computers could run Windows programs (if compatible with Wine) natively — resulting in speeds comparable to Mac specific programs. The Darwine project stopped active development on the PowerPC version of Darwine in late 2006, but was later revived and new builds — without code changes — were created, starting in mid-2008 by other developers. Version 1.0 was released on June 17, 2008, the same day as version 1.0 of Wine.

After this efforts were made to move patches from x86 upstream into the main version of Wine. On May 29, 2009, kronenberg.org stated that "As some might have read on Wine-Devel, Darwine is dead for good. The OS X port of Wine formerly known as Darwine is now Wine." It was also stated that in future kronenberg builds Darwine's WineHelper app would be replaced by a new one called WineBottler.

Prebuilt binaries

The Wine project provides source code for x86 versions of OS X but not binary builds. The Darwine project has had several developers release prebuilt binaries, available for download in a DMG disk image for easier installation from their Sourceforge project page.

See also

References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-01-26. Retrieved 2009-05-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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