I have a few really old Windows programs from the Windows 95 era that I never ended up replacing. Nowadays, these are really hard to run on Windows 10. Ironically, it is quite easy to run them on Linux, thanks to WINE:

“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, macOS, & 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.”

One such program is this Family Tree software that came with the July 2001 issue of PC Format magazine.

To run this, we first need to install WINE, which on Ubuntu (or similar) would work something like this:

sudo apt-get install wine

After popping in the PC Format CD containing the software, simply locate the autorun executable. Then run the wine command, passing this executable (in this case PCF124.exe) as an argument:

Selecting Family Tree 2 from the menu runs the corresponding installer. Although this expects a Windows-like filesystem and writes to a Windows registry, WINE has no problem mapping these out.

When this finishes, the program is actually installed, and can be found and run from the application menu of whatever desktop environment you’re using (in my case, Plasma by KDE):

For some bizarre reason, this particular family tree software requires a printer to be installed, and will not work without one. While you probably won’t have this problem, for me it was a tough one that left me wondering for a while. I managed to solve it only by asking for help on Ask Ubuntu and getting an extremely insightful answer:

“When you install printer-driver-cups-pdf (or cups-pdf for Ubuntu 15.10 and earlier) a PDF printer is added which saves the printed files in ~/PDF/. All the printers installed in your Ubuntu OS also work from WINE, you don’t need to do anything about it.
“But:
“If you just normally installed CUPS on your 64-bit Ubuntu (uname -r gives x86_64 if it is 64-bit), this won’t work when you run a 32-bit software like yours from 1995 presumably is. The solution in this case is to install the 32-bit CUPS library, so that 32-bit WINE is also able to find your printers:”

sudo apt install libcups2:i386

Sure enough, that worked when I did this on a virtual machine on another laptop, but not on this one. This time, I simply needed to install cups-pdf, because the CPU architecture is different.

As you can see, this Windows-95-era piece of software is now working flawlessly on Linux. Once this is done, don’t forget to eject the CD (the eject command in the terminal has been a fun discovery for me) to unmount it from the filesystem. If you need to uninstall a Windows program you installed via WINE, you can do so directly from your desktop environment’s application menu. And if you need go deeper, WINE’s filesystem is located in the hidden .wine directory under your home folder.