What is Wine Bottler?

Wine bottler is a Mac OS X application that “bottles” wine settings into packages to make running windows applications on a mac possible without needing a windows license and running windows in a virtual machine.

What is wrong with Wine Bottler?

Wine Bottler is beta software that is not well supported. It is supposed to include scripts called “winehacks” which make certain programs work but they do not show up on some systems. There is currently no solution to this problem and it prevents most applications from working properly. Even when “winetricks” is working, Wine will run some windows programs but is not a full alternative to a virtual machine. Wine is not able to emulate a window environment completely.

Alternatives

If someone needs to run a windows program on a mac they have other options. One option is installing Windows in bootcamp. Boot camp is free but requires a license for the Windows OS if the machine is not university owned. The other option is running a full version of windows in a virtual machine. You will need a windows license, as well as virtual machine software. VMware fusion is the officially support virtual machine and can be purchased from the computer depot. Another virtual machine software is Virtualbox, this is available for free at virtualbox.org, but is not support by UVM and still requires a windows license.