Darwine is Wine on Darwin. In plain english: running Windows apps on Mac OSX without a VM, i.e. without installing Windows on a virtual disk.

The 1.0rc1 release of Wine is very easy to install (I did a full build from source, as described here, which builds a dmg), with the usual "drag the app (a folder in this case) to the Applications folder". Everything appears to be neatly tucked away in a 67 Mb app bundle. I set up MacOSX so that all files with extension ".exe" launch WineHelper. And that's it - exe files become double-clickable and they... work. Pretty amazing stuff.

Behind the scenes, Darwine launches X11 for the gui, and opens two more windows: a process list and a console log.

I tried Pat Thoyt's Tclkit 8.4 and 8.5 builds and they work - Tk and all. There is a quirk with both of them that stdout, stderr, and the prompt end up on the console, but that's about it. Apps run on drive Z: which is the Mac file system, so everything is available.

This is fascinating. Maybe the time has come to try running MSVC6 straight from MacOSX. It would be great to automate builds from a normal command-line environment, running only a few apps on Win32 (i.e. msvc6's "cl.exe") and staying with TextMate, bash, make, as usual.

I just moved my Vista VM off to a secondary disk, reclaiming over 10 Gb of disk space filled with something that taxes my patience and strains the Mac (1 Gb RAM allotted to VMware and it still crawls). Having Win98, WIn2k, and WinXP VM's is enough of a hassle: I just tried upgrading XP to SP3 and it failed because 700 Mb of free space wasn't enough. Why didn't a quick disk check before the install warn me? Actually, the real question is: why is a 4 Gb virtual disk too small to comfortably run XP?

Darwine & Wine really deserve to succeed IMO. So that I can treat Windows as a legacy OS. And get back to fun stuff.