Wine 0

About the onlu thing I can’t reliably do on Linux that I can do on Windows is play Windows media files, the ones with the extensions *.wmv and *.wma.

This has nothing to to with Linux. Rather, Microsoft, in typical Microsoft fashion, keeps messing with the codec to keep those files proprietary in the hopes of further enslaving users to Windows.

Now, I can play some older *.wm? files. Both mplayer and VLC are capable of doing that.

Normally, this doesn’t bother me. I either ignore *.wm? files or stream them over the network to a Windows box.

But I finally got tired of commuting into the next room to watch the occasional video, did a quick webseach, and test drove Crossover Linux from Codeweavers, which uses Wine to run Windows programs on Linux or Mac boxes.

I could have set up Wine myself, but I didn’t want to learn anything; I just wanted the watch the darn video. After testing Crossover Linux for almost two and a half minutes, I went back to Codeweavers and registered the product.

Here’s picture of the result: That’s Windows Media Player v. 9 on the left, the Midnight Commander file manager on the right, this website viewed in the venerable Lynx text-based web browser at the bottom, of course, a shameless plug for the Linux Distro of Iron in the background.