Wine

Gaming - wine

Wine is an abbreviation for Windows Emulator- essentially, it creates an environment that fools games that only run in Windows into running in a linux environment.

$ sudo emerge -av wine

After wine has been emerged, it can be configured via the console.

$ winecfg

By default, wine will create a hidden folder in your home directory called .wine. Within that folder, a directory called drive_c will represent a typical windows c: drive, along with a symbolic link to it called harddiskvolume0. To make your experience with wine a bit easier, I'd recommend adding /mnt/cdrom/ as D: or Z: under the "Drives" tab, as well as a mapping to your home directory as another drive so your wine applications have access to the filesystem.

Wine stores different settings for every application you add in the "Applications" tab. The default settings are sufficient for most applications, but you may want to add specific settings for games you want to run in a window, at different resolutions, and otherwise.

Wine also has a certain amount of desktop integration, but support for this in Gentoo is flaky at best. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If you right-click on an .exe file and see "Open with Wine", fantastic! If not, you may have to wait for your next world update or re-emerge wine.

Note that the wine developers support people playing games they've purchased on Linux, but not piracy. So chances are if you've downloaded a cracked game that works in Windows, that crack will mostlikely not work using wine. Support game developers! If you like playing a certain game, purchase it.