Running Digital Micrograph on Linux or Mac OSX

As recently published in March 2012 issue of Microscopy Today,  It is possible to run Digital Micrograph without any virtualization software on Linux or Mac OSX.  The guide is freely available directly from the Microscopy Today website. The introduction of the article reads:

"Digital Micrograph (DM), the core software of Gatan’s Microscopy suite, is considered an industry standard among microscopists. The offline DM application is freely available from Gatan [1]. Unfortunately, DM software has been designed to run only on Microsoft Windows operating systems, thus distancing the microscopy community from popular Unix based systems such as Linux or Mac OSX. An ad hoc solution to this problem has required a virtualized Windows operating system running on top of the users native operating system. This is not only slow, having to emulate each processor instruction, but also requires installation and licensing of Windows and the virtualization software. However, with the aid of open source resources, it is possible to run DM natively on Linux and Mac OSX (Figure 1). This article was written as a guide with easy- to-follow installation instructions to liberate users from the Windows emulation pidgeonhole and enable them to freely analyze data on Unix based systems. 

Running Digital Micrograph (32-bit) on Linux and Mac OSX is accomplished with the use of Wine, an open source application that allows Unix-like operating systems to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows. Wine provides a compatibility layer that allows Windows system calls to be run on a substitute operating system. As stated by internal Wine admins, “You can start your Windows application straight from your regular desktop environment, place that application's window side by side with native applications, copy/paste from one to the other, and run it all at full speed” [2]. After installing Wine and the necessary Microsoft components, DM runs readily on Linux or OSX. The software has been tested using the offline DM V2.01 demo provided by Gatan."