I have installed wine and yet have been able to install a functional program. I relize it's is just an emulation program. but I was wonding if there was anoterh free alternative to wine that works better? If not what would be the best program to buy for windows emulation?

VMWare
cedega
xel
google them. I would choose VMWare personally though wine is also very good. I find that wine works on a higher percentage of windows programs than the others.

first wine is not an emulator. second, what are u trying to run?

Beer!!!

WTF WINE stands for Windows is not emulated, but he isn't the first to think it is emulated. I've seen several other people talk about performace problems due to emulation and all that stuff. If you are trying to run a game, WINE probably isn't going to work. WINE does not currently support DirectX very well. In a year or two though, I would expect WINE to handle directX just fine.

That's because on the surface it seems like it's an emulator, and the basic user could probably care less about what's actually happening under the hood.

Close but according to the wine website it stands for:Wine Is Not an Emulator

Whether or not wine is an emulator is besides the point.

However you'll probably notice considerable difference if you compare wine vs VMware or some other real emulator.

I haven't had any real trouble with wine, although i've only used it once or twice and for fairly old programs.

I couldn't get Windows Live Messenger to run under wine, and worms 2 had some problems with the fact that i'm using a double wide resolution. I think wine has an option somewhere to contain it within a virtual desktop.

If you ask for some help maybe we could help.

But you ask for alternatives, so i'll tell you. There are two alternatives which are both commercial products and both based on WINE. Crossover office specializes in Microsoft Office and other "office" type applications.

Cedega specializes in gaming on linux. Both are not free.