Introduction

z-Tree is a software written by Urs Fischbacher that is designed to work together with the Microsoft $^{\scalebox{.5}{\psovalbox{\rm R}}}$ operating system, notably Microsoft NT and variants thereof. Sometimes one might want to develop a z-Tree program when there is no Microsoft OS available, but a different operating system, e.g. Linux. There are various ways to do this:

• z-Tree runs actually on one or several machines with a Microsoft OS, only the display is forwarded (e.g. via rdesktop or vncviewer) to a Linux computer.

  This is relatively straightforward, but you will still need access to a machine with Microsoft OS over the network. Furthermore, this method is not very fast. All changes in the display have to be copied over the network.

• You run a virtual machine (e.g. bochs or vmware) on the Linux computer. On this virtual machine you install a Microsoft OS, and from this you start z-Tree.

  Again, this is straightforward to do. However, virtual machines are quite ressource hungry.

• You run z-Tree from an environment like wine² that provides the routines that would otherwise be provided by the Microsoft OS.

This document discusses the latter approach. The advantage is that wine is free software, the disadvantage is that the environemnt provided by wine is not a perfect copy of the Microsoft OS. Still, many programs, including z-Tree and z-Leaf, run quite well with wine.