WINE's acronym says it all, it means Wine Is Not an Emulator whereas VMWare is. :)
Here's an excerpt of WINE's "what is" on WineHQ.org ...
Wine is an implementation of the Windows Win32 and Win16 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows 3.x/95/98/ME/NT/W2K/XP binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
Addition ...
In WINE, you would not really need any Windows installed on your PC, it would run any WINE certified Windows apps by default. In VMWare it's different, since VMWare just emulates an x86 machine (thus creating a virtual x86 machine), you'll need to install Windows on that virtual machine of yours as it need an OS to run.
So what does this means? in WINE, you would not be able to run *all* Windows apps whereas in VMWare you can, albeit it's usually very slow due to the overhead of the emulated instructions.
Edited by Locohijo on 2002-08-08 03:43:25