Winelib is a development toolkit which allows you to compile your Windows applications on Unix. Most of Winelib's code consists of the Win32 API implementation. Fortunately this part is 100 percent shared with Wine. The remainder consists of Windows compatible headers and tools like the resource compiler (and even these are used when compiling Wine). Thanks to the above, Winelib supports most C and C++ 32bit source code, resource and message files, and can generate graphical or console applications as well as dynamic libraries. What is not supported is 16bit source code as the types it depends on (especially segmented pointers) are not supported by Unix compilers. Also missing are some of the more exotic features of Microsoft's compiler like native COM support and structured exception handling. So you may need to perform some modifications in your code when recompiling your application with Winelib. This guide is here to help you in this task. What you gain by recompiling your application with Winelib is the ability to make calls to Unix APIs, directly from your Windows source code. This allows for a better integration with the Unix environment than is allowed by runnning an unmodified Windows application running in Wine. Another benefit is that a Winelib application can relatively easily be recompiled on a non-Intel architecture and run there without the need for a slow software emulation of the processor. The requirements for Winelib are similar to those for Wine. Basically if you can run Wine on your computer then you can run Winelib. But the converse is not true. You can also build Winelib and Winelib applications on platforms not supported by Wine, typically platforms with a non i386 processor. But this is still pretty much an uncharted territory. It would be more reasonable to first target one of the more mundane i386-based platforms first. The main difference is that the compiler becomes much more important. It is highly recommended that you use gcc, g++, and the GNU binutils. The more recent your gcc compiler the better. For any serious amount of code you should not consider anything older than gcc 2.95.2. The latest gcc snapshots contain some useful bug fixes and much better support for anonymous structs and unions. This can help reduce the number of changes you have to do in your code but these are not stable releases of the compiler so you may not want to use them in production. So what is needed to compile a Windows application with Winelib? Well, it really depends on the complexity of your application but here are some issues that are shared by all applications: the case of your files may be bad. For example they could be in all caps: HELLO.C. It's not very nice to work with and probably not what you intended. then the case of the filenames in your include statements may be wrong: maybe they include 'Windows.h' instead of 'windows.h'. your include statements may use '\' instead of '/'. '\' is not recognized by Unix compilers while '/' is recognized in both environments. you will need to perform the usual Dos to Unix text file conversion otherwise you'll get in trouble when the compiler considers that your '\' is not at the end of the line since it is followed by a pesky carriage return. you will have to write new makefiles. The best way to take care of all these issues is to use winemaker. Winemaker is a perl script which is designed to help you bootstrap the conversion of your Windows projects to Winelib. In order to do this it will go analyze your code, fixing the issues listed above and generate autoconf-based Makefiles. Let's suppose that Wine/Winelib has been installed in the /usr/local/wine directory, and that you are already in the top directory of your sources. Then converting your project to Winelib may be as simple as just running the three commands below: $ winemaker --lower-uppercase . $ ./configure --with-wine=/usr/local/wine $ make But of course things are not always that simple which is why we have this guide at all. Let's retrace the steps above in more details. Getting the source First if you can try to get the sources together with the executables/libraries that they build. In the current state of winemaker having these around can help it guess what it is that your project is trying to build. Later, when it is able to understand Visual C++ projects, and if you use them, this will no longer be necessary. Usually the executables and libraries are in a Release or Debug subdirectory of the directory where the sources are. So it's best if you can transfer the source files and either of these directories to Linux. Note that you don't need to transfer the .obj, .pch, .sbr and other files that also reside in these directories; especially as they tend to be quite big. cd <root_dir> Then go to the root directory where are your source files. Winemaker can deal with a whole directory hierarchy at once so you don't need to go into a leaf directory, quite the contrary. Winemaker will automatically generate makefiles in each directory where one is required, and will generate a global makefile so that you can rebuild all your executables and libraries with a single make command. Making the source writable Then make sure you have write access to your sources. It may sound obvious, but if you copied your source files from a CD-ROM or if they are in Source Safe on Windows, chances are that they will be read-only. But Winemaker needs write access so that it can fix them. You can arrange that by running chmod -R u+w .. Also you will want to make sure that you have a backup copy of your sources in case something went horribly wrong, or more likely, just for reference at a later point. If you use a version control system you're already covered. If you have already modified your source files and you want to make sure that winemaker will not make further changes to them then you can use the --nosource-fix option to protect them. Running winemaker Then you'll run winemaker. Here are the options you will most likely want to use. --lower-uppercase --lower-all These options specify how to deal with files, and directories, that have an 'incorrect' case. --lower-uppercase specifies they should only be renamed if their name is all uppercase. So files that have a mixed case, like 'Hello.c' would not be renamed. --lower-all will rename any file. If neither is specified then no file or directory will be renamed, almost. As you will see later winemaker may still have to rename some files. --nobackup Winemaker normally makes a backup of all the files in which it does more than the standard Dos to Unix conversion. But if you already have (handy) copies of these files elsewhere you may not need these so you should use this option. --dll --console These option lets winemaker know what kind of target you are building. If you have the windows library in your source hierarchy then you should not need to specify --dll. But if you have console executables then you will need to use the corresponding option. --mfc This option tells winemaker that you are building an MFC application/library. -Dmacro[=defn] -Idir -Ldir -idll -llibrary The -i specifies a Winelib library to import via the spec file mechanism. Contrast this with the -l which specifies a Unix library to link with. The other options work the same way they would with a C compiler. All are applied to all the targets found. When specifying a directory with either -I or -L, winemaker will prefix a relative path with $(TOPDIRECTORY)/ so that it is valid from any of the source directories. You can also use a variable in the path yourself if you wish (but don't forget to escape the '$'). For instance you could specify -I\$(WINELIB_INCLUDE_ROOT)/msvcrt. So your command may finally look like: winemaker --lower-uppercase -Imylib/include . File renaming When you execute winemaker it will first rename files to bring their character case in line with your expectations and so that they can be processed by the makefiles. This later category implies that files with a non lowercase extension will be renamed so that the extension is in lowercase. So, for instance, HELLO.C will be renamed to HELLO.c. Also if a file or directory name contains a space or a dollar, then this character will be replaced with an underscore. This is because these characters cause problems with current versions of autoconf (2.13) and make (3.79). Source modifications and makefile generation winemaker will then proceed to modify the source files so that they will compile more readily with Winelib. As it does so it may print warnings when it has to make a guess or identifies a construct that it cannot correct. Finally it will generate the autoconf-based makefiles. Once all this is done you can review the changes that winemaker did to your files by using diff -uw. For instance: diff -uw hello.c.bak hello.c Running the configure script Before you run make you must run the autoconf configure script. The goal of this step is to analyze your system and generate customized makefiles from the Makefile.in files. This is also when you have to tell where Winelib resides on your system. If wine is installed in a single directory or you have the Wine sources compiled somewhere then you can just run ./configure --with-wine=/usr/local/bin or ./configure --with-wine=~/wine respectively. Running make This is a pretty simple step: just type make and voila, you should have all your executables and libraries. If this did not work out, then it means that you will have to read this guide further to: review the Makefile.in files to adjust the default compilation and link options set by winemaker. See the section for some hints. fix the portability issues in your sources. See for more details. If you find yourself modifying the Makefile.in to specify the location of the Wine header or library files then go back to the previous step (the configure script) and use the various --with-wine-* options to specify where they are.