The Wine project releases version 1 [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
June 18, 2008

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is one of the long-standing Windows interoperability projects that runs under Linux and other Unix-based systems:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. Wine is free software, released under the GNU LGPL.

Although not game-specific, the ability to run Windows games has always been one of the major driving forces behind Wine. The Wine AppDB page lists the numerous Windows applications that have been made to work under Wine. Photoshop CS2 stands out as one of the few most-popular Wine-compatible Windows applications that is not a game.

The Wine Features document lists Wine's capabilities, it is capable of running DOS through Windows XP applications, Windows Vista compatibility is not yet mentioned. The About Wine document explores the project's history, contributors, myths and more. The history document details the magnitude of the project: "Wine has grown to over 1.4 million lines of C code over the past decade. Nearly 700 people have contributed in some fashion. As always, you can expect Wine to be released sometime this year; or maybe early next year."

Version 1.0 of Wine was announced (see the LWN reader comments) on June 17, 2008:

The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road!

There have been a series of Wine 1.0 release candidates over the last month involving a ton of bug fixes, janitorial code work, translation improvements and more. The details are available in the series of release notes for RC1, RC2, RC3, RC4, RC5 and finally version 1.0.

Binary packages and source code for Wine 1.0 are available for download. While fairly unusual for most open-source projects, a commercial distribution of Wine known as CrossOver is available from Code Weavers. CrossOver Linux 7.0, which is synchronized with Wine 1.0, was announced this week.

(Log in to post comments)

The Wine project releases version 1

Posted Jun 20, 2008 18:46 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

The Wine project is doing an amazing job, but I have to wonder whether they are setting users
up for disappointment by using version 1.0. It appears they  were able to make the release by
simply postponing fixing of many bugs till after 1.0. Sometimes this makes sense, sometimes it
doesn't.

For example one should expect that networking would be working 100% by now. However networking
applications that rely on Windows libraries for SSL don't work and there are big chunks of
functionality missing. Internet Explorer works because it still carries Windows98 support, and
Firefox works because it doesn't rely on Windows SSL libraries, but other applications still
don't. See here for some details:
http://wiki.winehq.org/Secur32

I found this by accident a few days ago when a friend asked me to help him get a seemingly
trivial application running under Wine. It had minimal UI, no obscure dependencies or
functionality, its practically only purpose was to exchange simple messages with a server, so
it was disappointing that we couldn't get it working. We ended up using QEmu.

Of course I realize that there will always be a part of the Windows API that remains
unimplemented... Wine does work amazingly well.