Wine on macOS, I'm lost...

[Mondrayy]

Hey

 

I'm trying to get Wine on my Mac (MBP 2015) to run some engineering programs that are only available for Windows. I got that idea from my professor at university but he's too busy to individually teach us and said that we need to figure it out on ourselves if we want to run it using Mac. I've downloaded Wine Stable from WineHQ, also XQuartz latest version and my program that I want to run (THERM, also latest version. I'm aware it's not on supported list but he insists it works as he runs it using Wine). Last night I got somehow THERM installer to run and it installed the program somewhere. Then I tried to launch it to not do anything. Then I thought maybe I should just wipe everything and start over but now I don't even get THERM installer to show up. Maybe I didn't wipe it last night? I also don't know how to test it as I don't know where it might have installed my program.

I really would like to get Wine running and not bother with VM or Boot Camp as they require Windows install and eat up more RAM. Also, please don't suggest getting PC or come with suggestion not to game on Mac, I'm not going to do that. I just want to use my Mac the best possible way until I build PC in the future. I know I'm rare case but maybe we have someone here who knows what the issue might be. 

 

Thanks in advance

Mondrayy

[Mr. Smiley]

I know you said you didn't want to run Boot Camp, but your best bet is going to be that. It took me less than an hour to download a windows iso, and get it fully installed on my 2015 MBP. 

 

Although depending on how far into your college career you are, it might be worth it to sell the mac and buy a comparable windows machine. I know, that at this point in my college career that is where I am at as a bunch of the software I need to use does not work well or does not work at all on my mac. 

[Mondrayy]

6 minutes ago, Mr. Smiley said:

I know you said you didn't want to run Boot Camp, but your best bet is going to be that. It took me less than an hour to download a windows iso, and get it fully installed on my 2015 MBP. 

 

Although depending on how far into your college career you are, it might be worth it to sell the mac and buy a comparable windows machine. I know, that at this point in my college career that is where I am at as a bunch of the software I need to use does not work well or does not work at all on my mac. 

Well... I'll settle for VM probably if I don't get Wine working but I'd still like to get it running. And if I fail to get VM then I'll get Boot Camp. I'm the guy who opens up crap ton of stuff and I really don't want to always close everything and reboot to different system. As for getting similar quality PC... that doesn't exist. To get good display, good battery life, good trackpad, good IO and relatively slim design for 1300€.... there is no such machine and I'm already in Apple ecosystem. Why I want to use Wine is because that professor uses his Mac for everything and it works. I would probably avoid Windows on my Mac completely.

[RuZoG]

I've always had better luck in OSX rubbing a variant of WINE called Crossover. Ease of use and frankly I've been able to get more Windows apps and games to run without having to tweak things too much. Not sure if its an option for you or not but the VM Idea isn't bad especially if you are running it from a boot camp partition. Always seen better performance in OSX in a VM with a boot camp partition in both Parallels and Fusion.

 

CrossOver by default makes desktop shortcuts super simple.

 

I hope it helps.

[jpenguin]

Buy https://www.codeweavers.com/products/  

 

When apple developed it, X11 was decent on the Mac; xquartz is hit or miss

[duncannah]

Follow these instructions:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=3143

 

Still, I suggest a VM.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

open Wine, that'll land you at a terminal window. type in: winefile. that'll open a file explorer type program. navigate to the c drive, and then to where the program is installed and just double click on the exe of the program.

[wasab]

Open your terminal. 

Run winecfg which creates a fake c drive in your home directory called .wine or something. 

 

CD into the directory containing the .exe

Run wine whateveryourexeis.exe

 

If it is a stand alone exexcutable, the program will just run. If it is an installer, it will run the installer program which will then install the actual software in your fake c drive. Next go the software .exe and repeat the step above. 

 

You can also create a launcher. I don't know if this works the same way on Mac but on Linux, we can create a .desktop file and edit it's terminal commands and icons for shortcuts. 

 

Use crossover if you want something to manage wine for you. 

 

On Linux, we get to enjoy pretty much the free version of this, playonlinux. Don't know if you mac users do, I guess probably not.

 

Edit: crossover doesn't manage wine. It functions like playonlinux nonetheless. Support it if you can. They contribute like 75% of the source code at wineHQ