See also the general Wine FAQ.

Apple Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Wine and Darwine?

• Darwine began as an effort to port Wine to PowerPC Macs. Because Wine itself is not a CPU emulator, the Darwine project's chief difference is the incorporation of a CPU emulator into Wine. Since the Intel models were released, the Darwine project divided its focus: Darwine for Intel Macs is a normal port of wine for its operating system. Notice, that official WineHQ source supports Mac OSX x86 very well, and Darwine is NO MORE NEEDED to run Windows x86 applications under x86 Macs.

What does Wine on Mac OS X support? (DirectX, DirectSound, Direct3D...)

• Sound should be working just fine since Wine release 0.9.15.
• MIDI output (via Apple's built-in software synthesizer) works.

• 3D (OpenGL Support) works. Note that due to Apple's X11 often being outdated, we recommend you install XQuartz, available since 10.5 Leopard, which closely follows Xorg development. Since OSX 10.5.7, Apple X11 may be good and recent enough for wine 3D usage.

• Full screen mode works in a Wine release as old as 1.1.24. However, there are too many restrictions to make it generally useful:

  • Unlike CodeWeaver's X server packaged with their CrossOverMac product, Apple's X11.app will not change the screen resolution. So your app must support your monitor's likely huge native resolution, e.g. 1600x1200. If your app knows only 800x600 and 1024x768, it will not start and may even crash.

  • Some modern apps, although they may support your monitor's resolution during play, start with logos and intro animations that want to open a screen at 640x480 or 800x600. This will fail and may cause your application not to start at all or even crash. For instance, the game 2weistein - Das Geheimnis des roten Drachen - works well in full screen, yet the screen stays black at start, trying to display the first intro animation, while the subsequent second logo, intro movie and game logo all scale nicely to full screen.
  • The X11 menu bar will remain visible at all times. The app sees a screen resolution 22 pixel less than it really is, e.g. 1600x1178.
  • The dock will stay in front of the fullscreen window. Use its auto-hide feature to get rid of it.

  • "Always on top" windows remain atop Wine's fullscreen window, e.g. window #3 of the CPU% activity meter -- exactly like they do in TimeMachine's full screen display. Just close or hide them.

• mcicda.dll does not work (bug #20323), so apps will not play music off CD tracks.

• More generally, CD-ROM support is incomplete, so Wine will not start many copy-protected apps.

How do I change settings?

• If you use a wine package: Use winecfg.exe in the folder "Sample WineLib Applications" or in WineHelper the menu entry "WineHelper->Configure Wine". Alternately, if you want to, navigate to Wine.bundle/Contents/bin/ and run ./winecfg.

• If you built a plain wine: run /path/to/your/wine winecfg as on any other UNIX.

Audio output will only be enabled after you ran winecfg to configure it.

Where are Wine's settings stored?

• In your 'home' folder ("/Users/<username>/" resp. "~/") in the hidden folder ".wine", and in your preferences folder ("/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences") in the file "org.wine.winehelper.plist". You can get into (even hidden) folders in the Finder by pressing Shift+Command+G and entering the path, for example "~/.wine".

  You can make the hidden folder "visible" by creating a symbolic link: ln -s ~/.wine wine

How can I make a FAT partition work as drive C in virtual Windows?

• Run winecfg in the "Sample WineLib Applications" folder, select the tab "drives" and in the list "C:" and change its path. If your FAT partition is named "Duckbill" enter "/Volumes/Duckbill" for example. You may change the type to "local harddisk" in the advanced options too. Changing the path directly in the WineHelper Preferences seems not to work satisfyingly. And lastly - please copy content of "~/.wine/drive_c" to the new place with the following command "cp -a ~/.wine/drive_c/* /Volumes/Duckbill"

Will there be a PowerPC version (or will there be a way to run Wine on a PowerPC processor)?

• Darwine is the effort to port Wine to PowerPC processors, but still can't run windows binaries directly yet. The project seems to be dead.

Why is there no official WineHQ build for Mac OS on the downloads page?

• Please volunteer to build one on a regular basis!

Where can I get a working Wine for Intel Macs?

1. Since Leopard, you can build it yourself from source with nothing more than your Mac OS install DVD for XCode and XQuartz.

2. If you are a Fink or MacPorts user, consider installing the wine or wine-devel package.

All 16 bit applications crash in winevdm.

• This is radar://5935237 bug in Apple's linker since Xcode 3.x. It is reflected in Wine Bug #14920. 32bit apps are not affected. Workaround: get hold of a binary of Wine built with Xcode 2.x (distributed with Tiger).

How do I right-click in Wine on Mac OS X?

• Control-click, as you're probably used to, won't work in wine (so far?). Workaround: Enable secondary click by tapping the trackpad with two fingers. Therefor go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad and enable 'Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click'. You can then do the right clicks by tapping the trackpad with two fingers.

Update: if you are running a current version of Xquartz, you can go into the X11.app preferences when its running and select what you want to be modifier keys for right and middle clicks.

How to create an icon on the desktop to start a given .exe?

Instructions how to make a custom launcher .app file

• This is for real Wine, installed to /usr/local, not Darwine

• open up Apple's Script Editor
  • in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" this is "/Applications/Utilities/Applescript Editor.app"

  • in Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" this is "/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app"

• Copy and paste the following code into the Applescript editor

on run
        do shell script "PATH=\"$PATH:/usr/local/bin\";
export WINEPREFIX=\"$HOME/.wine\";
EXENAME=\"$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/MyProgram/MyProgramName.exe\";
wine start /unix \"$EXENAME\" > /dev/null 2>&1 &"
end run

• if you are using a different WINEPREFIX than the standard ~/.wine ($HOME/.wine) for this particular program, make sure you change the "export WINEPREFIX" line for that.
• on the "EXENAME" line, change after drive_c for the path and .exe name of the program you are trying to launch. (leave the \ at the end before the quote)

  • Note: be sure not to remove the extra \ symbols in there before most of the quotes, it will not work without them.

• After you have edited it for your program, save it as an Application
  • this will create a .app for you that you can double click to run what you specified, that is already installed on your machine.

  it might start up a bit slow with no visual indicators, especially if your Wine install has to build Font Metrics -- which it should not, see next question.

Instructions how to make a custom launcher .command file, invoking Terminal.app

• Use TextEdit to create the following file:

#! /bin/sh
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/X11/lib
cd "/path/to/my/app" && exec /path/to/wine "myapp.exe"

Add any needed variation, e.g. export WINEDEBUG=fixme-d3d,warn+heap,+debugstr or /path/to/wine start /unix "/path/to/my/app/myapp.exe"

• Rename the file to myapp.command instead of myapp.txt. .command is the suffix that Mac OS uses for shell (and perl, Python, tcl) scripts.

• In the Finder, use Command-I (Information) to make this script executable. Click "hide suffix" if you like.

Did you know that you can drag & drop an image onto the top left icon in this information window to define the icon for this file?

Look into the hidden ~/.local/share/icons/ directory, where Wine stores the icons created by application installers (.xpm and .png files); they would display on a Linux desktop.

The terminal window that opens when you launch the script shows both Wine's and the app's messages.

The Finder's preview will show the source code of the script.

Why is it building font metrics? This may take some time...

Actually, there are two bugs involved:

1. Bug #17674 "wine recaching font metrics on every run", consuming upto 30 seconds at program start. This is fixed in wine-1.1.31.

2. However, there is no need to cache font metrics at all as Wine should find a FreeType library greater than 2.0.5 because one is included in MacOS. If your Wine exhibits this problem, you probably need to set the DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable before launching Wine.

Start wine (in a Terminal) as follows: DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/X11/lib wine myapp.exe or

export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/X11/lib
wine myapp.exe

You may patch the main wine launcher yourself and forget about this variable. Save this patch file, then invoke patch -p1 < mypatch.txt in a Terminal, while at the top of Wine's source directory, see build it yourself.

Both MacPorts and Fink use a wrapper to the wine launcher which sets exactly this variable.

If I have a problem with Darwine on Mac OS X, where should I report the bug?

Since

• Darwine is a separate project with different licensing terms from Wine (GPL vs. LGPL),
• it's not clear what kind of patches they apply on top of Wine,
• the fact that they insist on a different name,

- report all bugs to Darwine developers.

Unanswered Questions

Using Winelib to build native applications

Does anyone know how to build unix applications with native x11 calls through Winelib on the macintosh platform? I have tried my best, but I do not think that currently this is supported on macs because darwine's way does not work (though it sounds like an excellent way) and currently all unix executables in Wine are in an .bundle file. When I try to put these in /usr/bin most say that they cannot find dylib.1 or something like that. I have created a new post on the forum asking this same question.

Obsolete? Please comment:

I get the error '''wine wineprefixcreate failed while creating '/Users/myusername/.wine'.''' when starting an application, what's wrong?

• This is a bug in Apple's X11 (edit: What is the bug? It hasn't been reported to us. Please report this "bug" at XQuartz), a workaround is:

  • to install the latest Xorg version

    • Mac OSX 10.5 includes the Xorg version of X11. If you're on Tiger, you can install the Xorg version using Macports. See the x11-users FAQ

  or

  • See the Setting Up section of The MacOSX/Installing section.