Last week, after a staggering 15 years in development, Wine hit release 1.0 last week.

Conceived in 1993 as a way of running Windows applications in Linux, Wine -- its recursive acronym stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" -- contains a compatibility layer comprised of alternative implementations of Windows DLLs. (One of the reasons the project has taken so long is because of incorrect, incomplete or just plain missing Windows API documentation. In some cases the Wine team's had to duplicate obscure bugs in order to get applications to work properly!)

Reaching version 1.0 is a real milestone. Amongst the applications that now work flawlessly in Wine are Adobe Photoshop CS2, Half-Life 2, and Call of Duty 2. There are more than 10,000 applications in Wine's Application Database, rated from Platinum (works perfectly) through to Gold (almost there), Silver, Bronze and Garbage (don't even bother!).




It can take a little while for distributions to catch up with new releases. (As of this blog date, for example, Ubuntu was only offering version 0.9.59 via its repositories.) So how do you get 1.0? Simple. Visit Wine's download page, choose your distribution and follow the directions.

While there are now numerous emulator alternatives to Wine (such as the awesome VirtualBox), the beauty of Wine is that applications work inside Linux without the need to install or run a Windows OS. And now that it's reached level 1.0 stability, commercial application developers have the added potential of reaching millions of Linux users with their formerly Windows-only software.

Over the years Wine has spawned a couple of commericial offshoots that are also worthy of a look. CodeWeaver's CrossOver ("Making every Mac and Linux desktop Windows-compatible") is largely aimed at productivity software, while Cedega ("the thrill of blockbuster gaming on Linux") is aimed squarely at gamers.

Cheers, Wine!


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