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Wine Windows IT Technology

Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced 165

An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set): many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
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Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced

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  • * frowns at emulator [winehq.org] tag *
    • well, it's emulating a platform API (as opposed to hardware)
      call it a compatibility or translation layer if you wish
      but it is an emulator
      (just not the regular (slow) kind)

      • Re:"emulator"? (Score:4, Informative)

        by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:12PM (#32302246)

        It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.

          it's stateless?

      • I know, I was referring to the same line Wine folks have been saying, and the recursive acronym [winehq.org] (Wine Is Not an Emulator).
      • by obi ( 118631 )
        Only if you call Mono an emulator too. Or if you call Glib/GTK or QT on Windows a "Linux emulator".

        I see Wine as an (alternative) implementation of the win32/win64 API and libs.
      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        An emulator is any software which models a piece of digital hardware, exactly in the ideal case. (If it's something analog you're after, you approximate it by writing a simulator instead.)

          You cannot "emulate" a software platform, you just rewrite it. Wine is a Windows API for Linux, BSD, and Mac. It's more like a clone than anything.

        • by QuantumG ( 50515 ) *

          I'd like to throw in the word "interpreter" just to annoy you.

          • by Khyber ( 864651 )

            I'll toss in the word "Translator" to make it more precise.

            • by NotBorg ( 829820 )

              I'll throw in the word "linker" just to confuse you both.

              Instead of your application linking with "real" Windows binaries it links with an alternate implementation of those binaries.

              In many cases an API function call is implemented without even making a call to X, GL, the native kernel, or any other part of Linux/Mac/etc. It is simply a reimplementation of the call. Translation does not fit here because it doesn't translate the Windows call to a native Linux call at all.

              And really both Linux, Windows, and

        • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          I would agree with you and break it down like this:

          Emulator - Software that implements or replicates the behavior and function of digital hardware

          Simulator - Software that implements at a presentation level the behaviors and possibly the functions of some type of hardware; but does not model the hardware completely.

          Translator - Software that changes one set of instructions into another set intended to duplicate the behavior of the original but prior to execution time.

          Interpreter - Software that changes one

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
        It is an adaptor that makes one set of APIs (POSIX + X11) appear like another (Win32). In most of computer science, we call that an emulator. It is not a CPU emulator (which makes one CPU appear like another), or a full system emulator (which makes one complete set of hardware appear like another), but it is an emulator. Oh, and it doesn't just reimplement the APIs, it also provides a run time loader and ABI compatibility. *NIX systems can't natively load Windows PE files...
      • well, it's emulating a platform API (as opposed to hardware)

        Any more than a Linux PC's X server "emulates" the X API? Or your Qt library "emulates" the Qt API? If you use the term "emulator" to refer to anything that doesn't involve interpreting or dynamically recompiling machine code, that cheapens "emulator" to the point where every library on your system is an emulator. Where I come from, Wine is called a "subsystem", just like Qt and Gtk+ are "subsystems".

    • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

      Does it run Crysis YET?

    • Indeed, that's the purpose of qemu. As clips on youtube of wine running on an N900 attest. (x86 --> ARM)

      • Unfortunately for the N900, QEMU implements the emulation a bit far down the stack. You compile WINE as a native x86 app, then any system calls that it makes are translated to native system calls. You don't have to emulate the kernel, but you do have to run all of the userland stuff in the emulator. Fortunately, the client-server design of X11 means that this excludes most of the graphics stack, including OpenGL.

        A better design, used by Transitive and others, moves the emulation barrier right up the API

  • But... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Andorin ( 1624303 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:53PM (#32302438)
    Does it run Linux [wikipedia.org]?
    • Does it run Linux [wikipedia.org]?

      The link to WUBI is is somewhat inappropriate: WUBI is an installer that installs Linux in a file hosted on a Windows filesystem using something that works as a Windows installer (and creating a Windows uninstaller for the Linux installation.) But it doesn't run Linux under Windows.

      So if you want a Linux under Windows distribution to talk about running under WINE what you really want is more Portable Ubuntu Remix [demonccc.com.ar], not WUBI.

  • ... a tad late.
    While I was fiddling with some Windows applications over the last 10 years, to make them work in wine (not too high a success rate, :( ); these days thanks to SUN Microsystems (anyone remembers??) I fire up my Virtualbox, and chances are, the application works.

    Has one made some comparison of speed, resource usage, of major applications between running in wine and running in Virtualbox? Google has a few hits, though of old age.

    • by shiftless ( 410350 ) on Saturday May 22, 2010 @12:49AM (#32302656)

      Apps are faster in Wine than VMWare. I tested Eve Online in both and it was noticeably faster in WINE. Both paled in comparison to running natively under WinXP on the same platform however.

      • by AusIV ( 950840 )
        I can't imagine many applications where the overhead of an entire virtualized operating system would be less resource intensive than running the application with a thin API layer. It might be necessary for some applications that don't work on wine, but I can't imagine it would be fruitful if the application functions properly on Wine.
  • 15 years to get to 1.0 means a speed of a 0.0666 increase in the version number per year. This extrapolates to 3 more years to get to 1.2. So it's not surprising to see a RC only two years later.

    (this post just nominated for the "worst use of extrapolation 2010" award)

    • It seems to me that the wine development process does not really scale well but they use also test based development and that seems to speed up the development cycle. Other aspects like the Dib Engine [winehq.org] are a governance nightmare of Wine. Though the patch is optional (has to be enabled) they didn't let it in although it supports some applications better and was a release target for 1.2. The Wine project management played Mornington Crescent with contributers for the DIB Engine for almost 10 years. It is a pit

    • by Wildclaw ( 15718 )

      Except of course that 1.0 and 1.2 are not real numbers. They are in fact two numbers separated by a dot. With real numbers 1.4 > 1.38. With version 1.4 1.38.

      • by Wildclaw ( 15718 )

        Bah, forgot about slashcodes complete lack of functionality. Should be "With versions 1.4 < 1.38"

  • I wouldn't mind helping, but: I'm not going to update from Jaunty just to test something "better" than Wine 1.0.1, the synaptic pkg in Jaunty. I would like to see Many Faces of Go work right (no screen artifacts, especially in drop shadows), but JellyFish Lite 3.5 works. Fallout and Fallout 2 used to work under the previous Wine. The only things I want to run are the Windows versionx of SmartGo and Rosetta Stone. Everything else does just fine in Sun's Office. Is Wine 1.2 going to be great? Depends h

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