VirtualBox may be free, but you still have to own a copy of Windows. If you’re not willing to shell out a few hundred dollars to Microsoft but still want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, there is one more alternative: CrossOver from CodeWeavers costs $40 and runs Windows applications on Mac OS X — without Windows.

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is

What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

There are three main commercial Wine products: Bordeaux, Cedega, and Crossover. There are a few distinct differences between the commercial Wine products and the FOSS Wine.

By now, you should have already heard of the popular Wine software that allows you to install Windows applications in Linux. There is also another paid application – CrossOver that utilities Wine and comes with a simplified GUI to help you get the job done easier. Now, here’s another software that is as powerful as Wine and as user-friendly as Crossover, and best of all, it is free.

Have you ever gotten annoyed by Wine/Cedega/CXOffice not matching to your otherwise pretty desktop? It is possiable to change the Wine color scheme to closely match your default desktop colors. You can even install a large varity of themes and have Wine use them to make your favorite applications look even better.

I’m usually quite happy with Linux software, so I don’t use Wine all that much. Normally, I only use Wine to test some web pages in IE. But now and then I have the need to edit some word file that Open Office can’t handle. For that reason I recently installed Microsoft Office on my Ubuntu at work with the help of PlayOnLinux.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment, management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob friendly.

PlayOnLInux 3.8 is now available ! This new version comes with a lot of new features and fixed many bugs, some plugins are now integrated in this software, adding a lot of features like for example: Capture - a new feature that allow you to record your games while playing, Other new features are wine import, Cedega import, Offline wine and more.

I like to play an occasional game of dota, the famous Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne mod, with my friends. It works perfectly with wine since I can remember (so, probably feisty). You don’t even have to install it using wine, just launch your windows installation and your fine. In fact, I kept my initial Warcraft III installation all the time in my ~/.wine directory and never had any problems.

Under Linux, it is possible to run a number of Windows applications without having Windows installed at all. This is done with Wine. I'm not talking about the fermented beverage some of us are quite fond of, but a package that runs on Linux. Allow me to paraphrase from the Wine Web site . Wine Is Not an Emulator.