Running BibleWorks 4 Under Linux

A little bit of Wine

If you want to run Windows programs under Linux, you have several options available to you:

If you primarily want to run applications rather than games, VMware may be a good option. VMware emulates a virtual computer inside your computer, on which you can install and run entire operating systems and applications. Using VMware under Linux, you could install a copy of Windows and BibleWorks, and run BW4 in its native environment. This may be the most effective way to run BibleWorks under Linux, from the reports I've heard about VMware. However, I've never tried it: VMware has somewhat steep hardware requirements (what do you expect: it creates a virtual computer inside your computer!) and comes at a cost (starting at $79). VMware is a very cool concept, but it's out of my league both for cost and requirements. Several free versions are in development, but I'm not aware that they're ready for prime time.
A few commercial competitors to VMware are out there, such as Win4Lin, but again, these are out of my league.
And then there's Wine, a "free implementation of Windows for Unix," to quote their homepage. Wine has been in development for a long time now--as long as I've been into Linux, in fact. You can read more about Wine elsewhere at this site. In short, Wine attempts to provide the resources Windows programs need to run under Linux. Given the complexity (i.e. "mess") of Windows, Wine does an amazing job. And Wine is free. I'll be using Wine for this BibleWorks adventure.

Getting some Wine

The easiest way to get Wine is to install a Linux distribution which includes it (e.g. Mandrake 7.2). That's only a temporary fix--Wine is constantly under development, and the version which came with your distribution is probably out of date already.

In order to get the latest version, go to the Downloads section of WineHQ. You'll probably want to find a binary package to suit your system, unless you really like recompiling software or you have a setup which will require you to rebuild Wine yourself. Most of the time a precompiled binary should do the trick.

Wine setup

Once you have Wine installed, you'll need to configure it for your system. Find wine.conf (usually it's in /etc), become root and edit the file. You'll probably need to change the disk drive configuration to point Wine at the proper drives, although if Wine is installed with your distribution, the installation program may make good guesses.

In my case, I needed to change the wine.conf configuration so that Wine knew which partition was the C drive (for Windows and BibleWorks) and the H drive (CD-ROM).

Give it a try

At this point, you may be ready to give it a try. I changed to the directory which contained bworks95.exe and typed wine bworks95.exe. Wine worked for a few minutes and gave me lots of messages about fonts, then the standard BibleWorks window popped up on my screen. I clicked on the opening banner as usual, and saw the normal BW4 display.

Well, pretty normal. I had been looking at the Vulgate last time I used BibleWorks, so I switched over to the Greek New Testament to see if I'd need to do some playing around to get fonts to work. Sure enough, the Greek showed up in Roman letters. Clearly I have some work to do, but this is a good start.

And so far it's been remarkably simple, hasn't it? With BW4 installed, it's simply been a matter of configuring disk drives for Wine, going to the BW4 directory and typing a command. Getting fonts to work won't be too much more work, either. After that, it's time to test functionality to see what works and what doesn't.

Next: Fonts

Comments? Questions? Want to share your own experiences? Let me know!