What is wine?

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Every once in a while appears "wine" among the computer tasks and I do not know what it is.
The problem is that it occupies a considerable percentage cpu capacity.
If it helps I have is a macbook pro 2.66 core 2 duo 4gb.

I've heard something that it might have something to do with windows but I do not have windows installed on my mac.
There is a printscreen attached of the ISTAT in which the "wine" appears.
Is this normal?
If not, how do I fix?

Thanks

Captura de tela 2011-06-22 às 09.31.23.png
 

chscag

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Have you at one time or another installed Wine on your machine? You can learn more about Wine and how to uninstall it from this website. Basically, Wine is an emulator for running Windows applications on an Intel machine.
 
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I've not installed any windows emulator.

I guess my computer is an alcoholic.
I've never installed any windows emulator.
I tried to type crossover or wine on spotlight but I didn't get any results.
Maybe VLC player or UnRarX can be the cause? Maybe some kind of plugin?
I noticed it appears when I was openning a .rar file.
It also appeared when I brought the file back to "downloads" after having deleted it.
Is this "wine" necessary?
Is there a way I can get rid of it, if I can't find it?

Thanks
 

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Does wine continuously show up in your Activity Monitor? Or just when you run a certain program?
 

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Wine is not an emulator. its an "application compatibility layer" designed to run your Windows programs via the APIs of the Mac OSX operating system. Its a really great open source, community run project.

WINE actually stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.

this makes no impact towards your troubleshooting in anyway, I just wanted to say, because you asked "What is WINE?" ;)

Have you ever installed a game ported through something called "Cider"?
 
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Good Job Robduckyworth!

That's right. WINE actually is an acronym that stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. I've been active in the WINE-users forum this summer.

You have an operating system, the kernel, which is ran directly by the processor. The kernel, in turn, runs all other programs. A kernel can decide to fully run a program, run part of a program, or not run any of a program. It can deny a program access to anything because IT'S what's running it.

So the top half of the kernel is a "program intake" where programs go in and may or may not get their code passed onto the processor.

The bottom half of a kernel passes on accepted code to the processor and uses the processor as the kernel's eye into the hardware world. The bottom half deals with hardware.

WINE mimics the top half of the NT kernel ("NT" means "Windows" as far as we are concerned here) because Windows programs are ran through WINE (like the "top half"), WINE does have a very similar architecture to the NT kernel, and it does manage the memory (RAM) of the programs ran through it.

But it is not a kernel because it doesn't have the bottom half. In fact, you cannot install a driver into WINE, it's main limitation. So Windows hardware emulation programs (which rely on a driver as the source of hardware emulation) like Daemon Tools cannot work in WINE.

Instead of bringing that code to a processor, WINE passes some of that on to the operating system to pass to the processor, and the parts that request function calls provided by Windows (and thus would have to be handled rather than passed to the processor), WINE translates into equivalent function calls the operating system can understand.

The result is that the operating system sees each Windows program, since it IS running them. They're just translated by WINE.

So if you run Oblivion (a game) through WINE in Mac OS X and bring up Activity Monitor, you will see BOTH the wine process and the oblivion.exe process! Mac OS X IS running Oblivion. No processor emulation, no virtual machines, no virtualization...none of that. In fact, it all gets rendered on your graphics card (if you have one)! That's because it translates the graphics calls; it doesn't compute them.

If you had VirtualBox in Mac OS X, had Windows in that, and ran Oblivion in there and then went back to Activity Montior in Mac OS X, you would see the virtualbox process, but you would NOT see oblivion.exe. What goes on inside VirtualBox is a blackbox to the host operating system.

Likewise, if you had a PlayStation emulator and ran a game in that, you would see the PlayStaion emulator process, but not the game inside.

WINE is Not an Emulator.

For the programs that work in WINE, WINE is a MUCH better alternative than a virtual machine because you don't have to put the load of a WHOLE OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM on your computer in addition to Mac OS X or whatever OS you have (at the same time). Also graphics get rendered on you REAL graphics, not emulated graphics. Plus you don't have to pay money to have a legal copy of Windows ;D. And you don't have to put the load of hardware emulation and a hypervizor on your computer (you have to emulate the hard drive, BIOS, network adapter, etc.). And you aren't slowed down by working out of image files. And you save all that hard drive space. And you don't have to put up with Windows.

WineHQ - Run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X
WineHQ Forums View Forum - Wine Users
WineHQ - Wine Application Database
FrontPage - The Official Wine Wiki

Cheers,
Jake
 
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Does wine continuously show up in your Activity Monitor? Or just when you run a certain program?

It only shows up when I'm running certain programs, like UnrarX.
Is it possible that a program may have installed it on my computer? Maybe as a requirement for the program to work?
Cause not long a go I had to format may HD and reinstall the OSX. So I would remember if I had installed this WINE.
 
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What apps have you installed or downloaded since the formatting of your drive. Wine doesn't appear by magic, so obviously it's one of those programs. UnrarX is probably the culprit, since it manages windows friendly .rar files. I suggest uninstalling it and using the unarchiver instead.

Don't be scared of Wine, though, it is a very useful piece of software.
 
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Wine is not an emulator. its an "application compatibility layer" designed to run your Windows programs via the APIs of the Mac OSX operating system. Its a really great open source, community run project.

WINE actually stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.

this makes no impact towards your troubleshooting in anyway, I just wanted to say, because you asked "What is WINE?" ;)

Have you ever installed a game ported through something called "Cider"?

jMEJG.gif
 
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UnRarX does not use WINE nor cause WINE to load. I confirmed that much just now. I also wouldn't say to just not use it… I like and use Unarchiver myself, but it's a one-trick pony. UnRarX can perform a wider range of functions if need be.

I see what the problem is. It's MacKeeper. Besides MacKeeper being an utterly horrid piece of FUDWare, the AV component is actually Windows software running using WINE. Yes… its AV component is NOT native Mac software.
 
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UnRarX does not use WINE nor cause WINE to load. I confirmed that much just now. I also wouldn't say to just not use it… I like and use Unarchiver myself, but it's a one-trick pony. UnRarX can perform a wider range of functions if need be.

I see what the problem is. It's MacKeeper. Besides MacKeeper being an utterly horrid piece of FUDWare, the AV component is actually Windows software running using WINE. Yes… its AV component is NOT native Mac software.

Thanks, great tip. It might be it. I have mackepper installed. Do you recommend other programs to do the mackepper's work? Like, anti-malware, optimizing and cleanning tools?
 
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Thanks, great tip. It might be it. I have mackepper installed. Do you recommend other programs to do the mackepper's work? Like, anti-malware, optimizing and cleanning tools?

That IS it. As for what to recommend… stick to Onyx for the occasional maintenance that "may" be necessary. TinkerTool System (not plain TInkerTool) is also very good and is the ONLY tool of this type I recommend spending money on.

As for malware, check the various threads. Most of us here don't use any anti-malware software since there is a near-lack of it, but we also tend to be more aware of what we are doing. The reason MacDefender exploits have changed that thinking a little as it applies to novices.

As for cleaning… there really isn't a need for it. Good luck getting MacKeeper off your system… it apparently is a very difficult task. There are threads aplenty here and elsewhere on the internet detailing that.
 
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Virgeist, I love Dilbert. Good job! As far as getting MacKeeper off, it sounds like Mac's version of Norton. In situations like that, you're often better off nuking your Mac OS X partition and reinstalling Mac OS X. That will get it for sure. Of course you save everything you want to keep first. I can't say from personal experience with Mac OS X, but I know the concept well from Windows. It helps that Mac OS X doesn't have a registry, but you still might not know where all the files are that get strewn across the partition from MacKeeper.
Cheers,
Jake
 

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It's not just the files that MacKeeper spreads around (you can find those easy enough with the right software) it's the hooks it places in the system. Like Norton AV for Windows, MacKeeper does more harm than good and is very difficult to get rid of.
 
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Virgeist, I love Dilbert. Good job! As far as getting MacKeeper off, it sounds like Mac's version of Norton. In situations like that, you're often better off nuking your Mac OS X partition and reinstalling Mac OS X. That will get it for sure. Of course you save everything you want to keep first. I can't say from personal experience with Mac OS X, but I know the concept well from Windows. It helps that Mac OS X doesn't have a registry, but you still might not know where all the files are that get strewn across the partition from MacKeeper.
Cheers,
Jake

It's not just the files that MacKeeper spreads around (you can find those easy enough with the right software) it's the hooks it places in the system. Like Norton AV for Windows, MacKeeper does more harm than good and is very difficult to get rid of.

Thank you all for the great hints. I'm learning more and more about the OS X.
Right now I can't reinstall Mac OS X. If I use the AppCleaner, will I get rid of the Mackepper? Maybe not entirely but enough so I can keep doing my stuff until I have time to format?
 
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Thank you all for the great hints. I'm learning more and more about the OS X.
Right now I can't reinstall Mac OS X. If I use the AppCleaner, will I get rid of the Mackepper? Maybe not entirely but enough so I can keep doing my stuff until I have time to format?

Nope, it won't. Those app uninstallers are largely useless. They root out some trivial support files… mostly preferences that, if left alone, take up a trivial amount of space and have zero impact on your system performance. Here's one site with some instructions on what to root out:
Uninstall MacKeeper - [Fix-KB]

EDIT: BTW… formatting and reinstalling OS X just to get rid of the traces of MacKeeper is overkill. Once you root out the right files, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
 

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