Lindows isn't doing anything new. It's just intergrating Wine, which has been around since 1993. You don't need Lindows to run Windows programs, you can do that on any Linux distrobutions by simply downloading and installing Wine.
Do we really know if it's running WINE? I've never seen that stated for fact. Could it be something else? I once messed around with Linux but most of the software I used was Windows based. I tried WINE but it didn't seem to run some of my programs very well i.e. buttons not showing up, etc.
No, we don't know that it is really just Linux running wine, in spite of what is posted elsewhere in this thread. That's the whole point -- we don't know how it's going to work or if it's going to work for that matter.
They are using code from Wine, at the very least...
"Starting with the base Linux OS gave the Lindows team a nice head start, after which all the team had to do was translate Windows app-to-OS hooks. The open-source WINE project helped out there."
I have Wine and it is pretty cool, but it is not any magic bullet, there is a performance hit and some applications refuse to run no matter what you do, the Devorak "Nobody wants to see a compatible OS appear on the scene that would make a 90-Mhz Pentium run rings around a gigahertz machine, which is a distinct possibility" almost killed me, I know this guy is an idiot, but that's beyond of been an idiot, I run Wine in a P4 2000 and it runs like a P 600 mhz or so (Some things faster some others slower)
Yes, it uses Wine. It would be incredibly stupid of them not to use Wine. Converting Windows APIs to Linux APIs is a very tedious and difficult process. Wine has been in development for 8 years with the goal of doing that, and even after all that time Wine still isn't past the alpha stage. That should give you an idea of the massive amount of work Wine programmers are putting into this. Seriously, the source code to Wine is mind-boggling complex.
Wine has come a long way since the Windows 3.1 days. It can emulate many programs with relative ease and quickness, and can even emulate many retail games such as Half-Life and Soldier of Fortune with pratically no crashes or bugs.