First Release Candidate of Wine 1.0 Released

moronikos writes to mention that the first release candidate of Wine 1.0 was announced and released into the wild today. This new version includes only bug fixes as the team is in a code freeze while pushing for the full 1.0 release.

but...

does it run linux?

Re:but...

does it run linux?

No only windows executables, but you can run cygwin to get a linux-like environment ;)

Re:but...

Wine is not an emulator.

Re:but...

Wine is not an emulator.

I thought you drink it!?

Re:but...

I am not familiar with MAME, but the other you mention are emulators, in that they perform byte-code interpreting of the program code (I guess MAME does too). Wine does not, it only provides an ABI-compatible implementation of (most of) the WIN32 API.

If Wine would be an emulator, it would run equally well on PowerPC or SPARC hardware. It does not, you need the exact same hardware that the original program was intended for.

Finally, for the semantically pedantic: yes, recent versions of Dosbox also have a "dynamic" execution mode which tries to do the same that wine does. Naturally, it only works when running Dosbox on x86-compatible hardware.

Re:but...

I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you this: Anybody with a strong opinion on the matter is full of shit.

Re:but...

An emulator manually interprets the original system's machine code, solving a hardware incompatibility, a compatibility layer only implements an API (in Wine's case the Windows API), solving an OS incompatibility. Technically an emulator doesn't have to be on different hardware to the original, but it's fairly pointless to do.
Dosbox is technically both an emulator and compatibility layer, because it covers both hardware and OS changes, most emulators run the original hardware's OS (if it has one).
The Java Runtime would be an emulator if it wasn't for the fact that there is no hardware that runs Java bytecode natively (or at least, it came after the Java Runtime).

Re:but...

If I recall correctly, there's a native Windows version of WINE just for that sort of thing.

Wait, What?!

I was always under the impression that WINE, based on how it is designed, would never be finished, or even close to a finished release point. I mean, yeah, I know 1.0 doesn't mean it's done, just that it hit a specific milestone, but even so, WINE, being considered a ⥠1.0 version seems to me like it shouldn't happen until it can at least come close to running most everything thrown at it.

Just my non-developer, non-programer, former WINE-user $.02.

Re:Wait, What?!

The Wine 1.0 Release Criteria are that the following work:

1. Photoshop CS2 tryout
2. Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 97 and 2003
3. Microsoft Word Viewer 97 and 2003
4. Microsoft Excel Viewer 97 and 2003

That's all they're targeting. I think it's a great idea to get to that level first, then expand without regression.

So what's the definition?

I mean, I've been running Windows software under WINE for *years*. What's their definition of "1.0"? Does it really mean anything, or will we be getting 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc monthly afterwards anyway just like before? Or is 1.0 some "complete feature set" release, suggesting that I can now run any windows software (I doubt that's true, considering that even MS Office is still a bit shaky).

http://www.winehq.org/?announce=1.0-rc1 [winehq.org] pretty much has a list of bugfixes&features, just like any other release. Where's the beef in "1.0"?

I've got your definition right here

The beef is described at
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria
In essence, 1.0 is just another release,
but with more stability (e.g. a month's
codefreeze and only very careful bugfixes)
and a few longstanding bugs
(e.g. serial I/O, dos apps) fixed not because
lots of people need them, but because it just
seemed wrong to reach 1.0 without fixing them.

Dan Kegel
Wine 1.0 Release Manager

Do we still need to wait for SP1 ...

.. before it is usable? :)

Hooray! Long live Wine 1.0!

I think this is great Wine is finally reaching "1.0". I am hoping this version will be treated as a longer lived, stable, supported branch. This way developers might seriously target Wine as a platform or at least consider it a real "Microsoft Windows Compatible" target (Yea, it would be better if ports of apps were targeted to be Linux or Mac OS X native)

Sure it won't run all Windows apps perfectly - but then again, neither does Windows! There are lots of apps out there that have various bad code that often shouldn't even run at all but somehow gets away with working under a generic Windows XP install. Then they crash under Wine, Windows Vista, or even XP under odd configurations. And then there are the ones that do things different under different versions of Windows to get around bugs or varying behavior in Windows.

Also having a longer lived "1.0" branch would mean tips and tricks to getting individual programs to run would not become obsolete quite as quickly, and a Wine "1.0" users would not have to worry as much about apps breaking every few weeks.

At any rate, Wine has come a very long way - I remember when it was just trying to be a Windows 3.1 clone!

Candidate version number

So, this would be Release Candidate version 0.01 right? ;-)

Wine - an unmitigated SUCCESS!

Just look at the list of applications supported by Wine [winehq.org] and you'll understand why I say that. Basically, if I can run Civ IV, Heroes IV and other strategy games on Linux, and with Matlab having a Linux version, there's very little to justify my using Windows. OK, there's Fruityloops, but that's it!

Re:serious question

Because Wine is not an emulator, it is faster and uses less memory than emulators.

How well do 3d games work with emulators?

If you run Windows on a virtual machine, you will still need Windows for that. With wine you don't.

But obviously you are free to use what ever you like and what works best for you. As wine is not ready, it is not a perfect solution, even it does have some advantages for the applications that work with it.

Re:serious question

doesn't wine still require windows files to run things like d3d? so to run it legally you still need to purchase windows anyway?

The short answer is, as another poster wrote: No.

The long answer is that not all of the DirectX features are quite there, I don't know if it's current but there's an overview here [winehq.org]. The result is that some games won't play without native DLLs. Doing that requires the Windows files and adding an override in winecfg. This was a much larger issue before than it is now and it keeps getting fewer that need these overrides.

Re:serious question

Really? I'm looking at that page and don't you know, it seems that Direct3D v9 is 95% supported...

Re:serious question

Because WINE can run "Lander on the moon" from Windows 3.11 and Windows XP/later cannot.

Re:serious question

"Why would I want to use Wine when I can just run windows in a virtual machine?"

You don't have a lot of spare RAM? (e.g. using VirtualBox requires enough RAM for the host OS + the RAM for the virtualized OS + the RAM for the app running in it; with Wine you eliminate the need for the virtualized OS)

You don't want to buy a Windows license/pirate Windows for a single app? (or more generally, you don't want Microsoft code on your system if you can help it? :)

Re:Y'know

Well, yeah, it depends on what you need, doesn't it? What you say is true for many, maybe even most people, but that doesn't mean nobody needs Wine.

If you have to interoperate with Windows users who use specific software, and the Linux equivalents can't read/write files from that software sufficiently well for your purposes, then you may still find yourself looking for a way to run the Windows programs. This used to be the case a lot with MS Office; modern Linux office apps are pretty good at interoperating, so it's not an issue so much, though there are still a few rare cases where the Linux software won't be able to duplicate what MS Office does quite well enough. (Complex VBA macros that automate other Windows applications, for example. Though I don't know offhand whether Wine can handle those either, and frankly anyone who uses them deserves the pain they cause :)

Then there are the cases where the Linux programs are genuinely inferior. Again it's a question of whether that actually matters. For example, GIMP is good enough for most casual users and even many professionals, but still a lot of people are inevitably going to find there are things they need that it doesn't do, and then they're going to want a way to run Photoshop.

And finally we have the fundamental matter of freedom of choice. Some people just prefer various proprietary Windows applications, and it's good that they can have the freedom to choose to retain those, even if the Linux equivalent would work just as well. Linux is all about the freedom to use your computer how you like, after all!

Re:Infinite Loop

You will be eaten by a grue.

Re:What does 1.0 mean?

Version number schemes vary between different software, and you'll have to ask WineHQ specifically what they mean to be at 1.0.

In the FOSS world, though, usually version 1.0 is a pretty big milestone showing that the software is complete, with few bugs known and little or no features missing. Some projects gone on for years in the 0.x numbers before ever getting to 1.0 (if ever). Wine itself started just naming it on the date (eg, Wine 20020314), but a couple years ago or so they started calling it 0.9.0 and so on.

Usually the big number in a version number represents important steps, though this can of course vary. For example, OpenBSD doesn't bother with making a fuss about what the number on the left means and they just increment by 0.1 always (after 3.9 came 4.0, and so on). GNU Emacs decided a long time ago that no complete rewrite would ever happen, and so they constantly increment the big number for large changes (they're at version 22.0 now). Hell, Netscape even decided to skip an entire number (4.7 -> 6.0) after the original company died and the new versions were based on the Mozilla project.

Re:What does 1.0 mean?

Actually they do say, what's their target for wine 1.0:
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria [winehq.org]