The other day I received this screen shot from user Pete who seems to have Cantabile running reliably on Linux:

That magic that makes this possible is Wine — http://www.winehq.org. If you’re not familiar with this project their about page describes it as follows:

Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.

Given Cantabile’s performance requirements, heavy use of multi-threading, audio and MIDI device requirements and non-standard UI, to see Cantabile running like this is very impressive.

According to Pete, the setup he’s running is Puppy Linux JXS 5.7 v3 and Wine 1.6.2 i486_v2.1 and it’s reliable and stable.

Although this isn’t something I officially support, it’s still very cool.