Final Release Candidate for Wine 1.0 today

The final release candidate (RC5) of Wine Release 1.0 will be released today.

This release is the culmination of 12 years of development.

Wine is an implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. It does not require Microsoft Windows, but can use native Windows DLLs if they are available. It 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.

Wine consists of:

  • An .exe loader
  • A control panel
  • Notepad, regedit, explorer, wcmd
  • Core DLLs (that know about Unix)
  • User DLLs (eg riched20.dll, not Unix specific)
  • A few essential fonts

In short, everything needed to run a Windows app

Pre-Wine history:

1991: IBM says OS/2 2.0 will run Windows apps
1991: Bristol ports Win apps to Unix with Wind/U
1993: MS promises “Windows Everywhere”,
Mac “Windows Compatibility Library”,
showcases Wind/U
1993: Sun announces WABI and PWI
1993: Users want “PWI for Linux”, start Wine

Wine History Earkly days:

1994: Alexandre Julliard becomes maintainer
1994: Solitaire runs
1996: Wine adds win32 support
1997: Word 95 starts working

Wine, recent history:

1997: winehq.com created
1999: Corel hires engineers to improve Wine
1999: Codeweavers funded to improve Wine
2000: Alexandre moves to Codeweavers
2000: Borland hires Codeweavers to improve Wine
2000: Address Space Separation
2001: Lindows hires Codeweavers to improve Wine
2002: Wine switches to LGPL
2002: Codeweavers releases Crossover Office
2002: Wine starts Conformance Test Suite
2003: Disney pays to fix Wine to run Photoshop 7
2005: COM, MSI implemented; DLL separation complete

Full credit goes to Dan Kegel for the history…

Update: As Dan pointed out to me I was mistaken about todays release. Todays release is the final release candidate for Release 1.0 not the actual Release 1.0. Thanks for the correction Dan

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 14:28 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Final Release Candidate for Wine 1.0 today”

  1. Dan Kegel Says:
    08.06.13 at 15:54 | Reply

    Nope, today is rc5. 1.0 won’t be out for a few days.
    See http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan

  2. Ché Kristo Says:
    08.06.13 at 16:02 | Reply

    Thanks for the correction Dan. Much appreciated.

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