eWeek - February 1, 2010

n our last issue, I wrapped up a trio of columns
on the topic of running Windows applications
on alternative platforms with a dismissal of
Also, neither application fit in comfortably with
the look and feel of my desktop, and neither used
my system’s native GNOME file access dialogs.

Wine—the open-source project aimed at building a home for Windows applications on Unix-like hosts such as Linux and OS X—as a viable solution for this cross-platform quandary.

I was prepared this week to move on to other
terrain when Wine reared its head again—this
time not in the form of a message from an impas-
sioned reader, but in the course of a Saturday after-
noon search for a slicker alternative to the default
MySQL Query Browser application that I’ve been
using a lot lately for a fantasy basketball project
Of course, one of my main qualms about the
default MySQL query tool is that it uses an old ver-
sion of the GNOME dialogs. These dialogs, which,
like the Wine dialogs, lack support for setting up
and visiting file location shortcuts—such as to the
directory where I keep my SQL query files.

All told, my experiences trying out both of these Windows-native applications through Wine were positive, with the key difference between running these particular Windows applications vs. any arbitrary applications under Wine being the ISV I’ve been working on.

support.

In my dressing down of

‘MY EXPERIENCES TRYING OUT BOTH OF THESE WINDOWS APPS THROUGH WINE WERE POSITIVE.’

Wine, I noted that users are
unlikely to find Wine men-
tioned in their ISVs’ support
matrices, but, as I learned,
two of the most frequently
recommended MySQL query
tools I encountered, Premi-
umSoft’s Navicat Lite and
the open-source HeidiSQL,
owe their Linux support to none other than the
If more Windows ISVs set
out to reach non-Windows
platforms via Wine, the proj-
ect would have a brighter
future than the one I laid
out in my previous column.

Wine project.

Navicat comes along with its own implemen-
tation of Wine, which accounts for 63MB of the
overall 91MB Navicat for Linux package—not a bad
corkage fee, considering that by bringing its own
Wine, PremiumSoft can ensure that things like
font anti-aliasing will work without any registry
tweaks required. HeidiSQL doesn’t come with its
own copy of Wine. Instead, it relies on the copy
you get from your Linux distributor or from the
And who knows? Perhaps
even Microsoft could come
to take a leadership role in
the viticulture of the Win-
dows software ecosystem. After all, Microsoft
surprised many when it announced plans to
produce, in association with Intel, a Linux-native
version of Silverlight to run on Intel’s Moblin
operating system.

As for my own query browser search, I’ve settled for now on an open-source application, called CrunchyFrog, built out of Python and the GNOME-native (but still Windows-compatible) GTK framework. Still, my search has given me a new respect for Wine. If you depend on Wine for running particular Windows applications outside of Windows, I’d love to hear about them. ;

I downloaded both of these applications, and both ran well on my Ubuntu desktop.

To be sure, the experience wasn’t perfect—on HeidiSQL, for instance, launching the application’s built-in MySQL help browser made the query editing pane inaccessible, thereby seriously limiting the usefulness of that documentation.