After a mere 15 years of development the Wine team yesterday announced the release of Wine 1.0, the first full official release. Wine, however, is already in widespread use in the Linux community and has been for most of its 15-year development.
For those not in the know, Wine allows a wide range of Windows applications to be run on Linux without needing to install Microsoft’s operating system.
Wine is not an emulator so much as a Linux replacement for core Windows components needed to run applications from that platform.
Despite the 15-year development cycle, the Wine team said in its announcement that compatibility in 1.0 may not be “perfect yet”. But the good news is that “thousands of applications have been reported to work very well”.
To see see what applications can be run using Wine see http://appdb.winehq.org.
The source code for Wine 1.0 can be found at:
http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.0.tar.bz2 or
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.0.tar.bz2
Binary packages for various distributions including Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva and Red Hat are already available from http://www.winehq.org/site/download.
