![]() ![]() WineBottler allows users to bottle Windows applications as Mac apps. Wine has always been popular among Linux users for running Windows programs, but Wine is available for Mac, too - and now, free utility WineBottler can 'bottle' Windows programs into separate application bundles that run as standalone Mac apps. Share this story • • • Linux users who want to run Windows applications without switching operating systems have been able to do so for years with Wine, software that lets apps designed for Windows run on Unix-like systems. There has been no robust equivalent allowing Mac applications to run on Linux, perhaps no surprise given that Windows is far and away the world's most widely used desktop operating system. A developer from Prague named Luboš Doležel is trying to change that with ',' an emulation layer for OS X. 'The aim is to achieve binary compatible support for Darwin/OS X applications on Linux, plus provide useful tools that will aid especially in application installation,' Doležel's project page states. Darwin is Apple's open source operating system, which provides some of the backend technology in OS X and iOS. The name 'Darling' combines Darwin and Linux. Darling works by 'pars[ing] executable files for the Darwin kernel. Load[ing] them into the memory. And execut[ing] them.' But there is a ways to go. 'Darling needs to provide an ABI-compatible [application binary interface] set of libraries and frameworks as available on OS X. By either directly mapping functions to those available on Linux, wrapping native functions to bridge the ABI incompatibility, or providing a re-implementation on top of other native APIs,' the project page notes. Doležel, who started Darling a year ago, described the project and its progress in an e-mail interview with Ars. Darling is in the early stages, able to run numerous console applications but not much else. 'These are indeed the easiest ones to get working, albeit 'easy' is not the right word to describe the amount of work required to achieve that,' Doležel said. 'Such applications include: Midnight Commander, Bash, VIM, or Apple's GCC [GNU Compiler Collection]. I know it doesn't sound all that great, but it proves that Darling provides a solid base for further work.' Users must compile Darling from the source code and then 'use the 'dyld' command to run an OS X executable,' Doležel said. One roadblock is actually getting Mac.dmg and.pkg application files working on a Linux system. Because doing so isn't that straightforward, Doležel said, 'I've written a that enables users to mount.dmg files under Linux directly and without root privileges. An is underway.' Unix/Linux synergy The fact that OS X is a Unix operating system provides advantages in the development process. 'This saved me a lot of work,' Doležel explained.
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