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In a recent e-mail conversation with Timur Tabi (of Win32-OS/2), I asked him about opening the source to Win32-OS/2 and collaborating with the Wine crew. For instance win32-OS/2 has some Direct X support, allowing Quake 2 3D-Now, and Destruction Derby II to run. And this was his reply: "We have already announced our intent to release the source code as well as use code from WINE. The announcement was made at Warpstock". Timur gave the Win32-OS/2 speech at Warpstock. update In related news, Wine 990110's out.

zootsuite writes "After an end of year coding rush, Wine-990103 has been released. Any bets on when Microsoft will stop making operating systems, and stick to the apps? "

The Alchemist wrote in to say that Lotus Notes 4.6a now runs on Wine-981109. Also, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote in to say "Great news! WINE Office 97! Both Winword and Excel work. Not perfect, but at least you can type :-) Older version supported Word 2.0 and 6.0, but at last the WINE team is "up to speed". And even before Corel is coming in..." I see bright shiny things in our future, like maybe I can get addicted to Diablo again...

The Alchemist wrote in to say that Lotus Notes 4.6a now runs on Wine-981109. Also, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote in to say "Great news! WINE Office 97! Both Winword and Excel work. Not perfect, but at least you can type :-) Older version supported Word 2.0 and 6.0, but at last the WINE team is "up to speed". And even before Corel is coming in..." I see bright shiny things in our future, like maybe I can get addicted to Diablo again...

Jamie Katz writes "Another fairly substantial instance of a big computer company helping out some good Ooen Source software: Corel will use WINE to port it's applications to Linux; in the process of doing this, Corel will hack WINE to make it work better. "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project."" It's all in the apps guys. This is a great bridge to get the mainstream over here. Great news.

Justin Bradford writes "Corel announced on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine that they plan to use WineLib (the library side of WINE, the open source Windows emulator) to port all of their products. Here's what Gavriel State (gavriels@corel.com), Linux porting team leader, had to say: "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project. Once our exploration and evaluation has settled down a bit (read: we've cleaned up our hacks), we'll begin submitting patches to Alexandre to review and commit to the CVS tree. We'll be spending some effort on getting the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running under Wine, but our primary focus will be on porting ou WordPerfect Suite 9 applications using WineLib. We'll also begin participating publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can contribute our ideas as well as our code. You should be seeing a lot more of us in the future."" S: What is of particular interest to me is that they have already coded a Win32-on-MacOS library when they ported CorelDraw to the Mac. This means Corel has very valuable expertise in the Win32-emulation area.

Bristol is a small company that makes a cross platform tool which enables Windows programs to run under Unix. Unlike Wine they use Microsoft's Windows source code. Now they are suing Microsoft for illegally using its operating system monopoly power to undermine the competing Unix market, according to their lawsuit. What's interesting is that Sybase submitted an affidavit in Bristol's favour. Perhaps now they'd be interested in helping/funding Wine?

Morten has written in with an excellent summary of the Wine project, and an updated status report. This is definately a critical project and deserves attention. Click below to read what he has to say about it. the following is a feature written by Morten Wine, The Windows Emulator Actually, Wine is two things at the same time. First of all, it is a binary emulator that will let you run your Window 3.1/95/98/NT binaries without having to have a copy of Windows on your computer. You will require the DLLs your program uses, but Wine intends to supply replacements for all the standard ones.

When used this way, Wine loads your program and jumps to its entry point. Wine then intercepts all calls to the system DLLs and substitues suitable X-Windows calls. Assuming that we can substitute calls that are efficient, your program should run at regular speed. Moreover, we can integrate Windows programs and regular programs such that cut-and-paste operations work as expected.

(Other projects -- such as Bochs and to a certain extent Dosemu -- want to give you Windows running in an emulated PC. We wish them luck, but for this particular purpose we don't think that is the right way to go. They will have to pay Microsoft for that Windows copy and the integration between programs will suffer.)

Wine, The Windows API Implementation Secondly, Wine is an implementation of the Windows API allowing you to compile Windows programs into Unix binaries -- if you have the source code, of course. Thus, Wine (Winelib, actually) is a GUI toolkit, but since we don't intend anyone to develop directly for it, we don't see it as competing with GTK, Motif, Qt, and you name it.

We hope that Winelib can help transfer usable, free Windows programs into the Linux world with only little work. We also hope that developers -- who might want to spend the money doing a real port -- could use Wine as a quick way of entering the Linux world with their already-written programs.

Status Wine already runs your favourites: FreeCell, Solitaire, WinMine, and MSHearts. (Hey, that was 90% of the reason to use Windows already -- way to go, :-) MS Words and Excel are close to being useful; for some versions and people, they already are. Success has been reported for the Power Point viewer, but Power Point proper still needs some work. Also, the Forte Agent news reader is reported to be functioning well enough to be useful. More information can be found right here.

Since many programs are build with toolkits like MFC, we believe we are "close" to getting a lot of programs working. Time will tell.

Problems There are three major problems in the Wine development: The Windows API is really, really big. Wine is thus a large scale operation. Luckily we can proceed one function at a time. Much of Windows is undocumented -- and programs depend on undocumented stuff. This is by far the worst problem. Implementation of some system call can be quite difficult when you have no clue what it does. In my humble opinion, the US Department of Justice should have demanded full disclosure of all documentation regarding all function calls ever called by a Microsoft application. (Recall that Explorer clearly was an application at the time it came out. The "integrated part of the OS" mumbo jumbo came later.) There really is no good reason why Microsoft's application writers should have such information denied competitors. Lack of Windows API knowledge. Many of the Wine developers don't know what they are doing, yours truthfully included. We have some Microsoft documentation, some books, lots of Unix experience. Then we start coding. This would work better if Microsoft's documentation was correct and complete, but it certainly isn't. Wine Development The Wine project operates a bit differently from other Linux projects. Developers tend to come and go. We live in USENET space although nowadays we also have the Wine HeadQuarters. (Sorry. We're not a multi-million enterprise; the /. effect will probably kick in sooner rather than later.) New versions come out biweekly and are edited by our fearless leader, Alexandre Julliard.

(PLUG type=shameless)Please help with Wine: test your favourite applications, regardless of whether Linux alternatives exist. Tell us what breaks and how. Better yet, send us patches for bugs and missing functions. Is it worth it? Well, read what Linus says about Wine:

Wine, on the other hand, is in my personal opinion one of the most important linux projects currently under development. The ability to seamlessly run windows binaries among linux applications (all showing on the screen at the same time, with cut-and-paste working between them and eventually even maybe some kind of drag-and-drop setup) would be a huge advantage, mainly because windows has what linux lacks: end-user applications.

Other benefits from participating in the Wine project:

• You will get the occasional junk email about alcoholic fluids made from grapes.
• The resident comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine troll will tell you that you are a member of one of the world's secret communist parties -- I kid you not! Their main activity seems to hinder Wine development, if our source can be trusted.
• "No, I am not playing games -- I am performing valuable testing of Wine."

Thank you for you time.

-- Morten Welinder, terra@diku.dk. A member of, but not speaking on behalf of the Wine team.

Morten has written in with an excellent summary of the Wine project, and an updated status report. This is definately a critical project and deserves attention. Click below to read what he has to say about it. the following is a feature written by Morten Wine, The Windows Emulator Actually, Wine is two things at the same time. First of all, it is a binary emulator that will let you run your Window 3.1/95/98/NT binaries without having to have a copy of Windows on your computer. You will require the DLLs your program uses, but Wine intends to supply replacements for all the standard ones.

When used this way, Wine loads your program and jumps to its entry point. Wine then intercepts all calls to the system DLLs and substitues suitable X-Windows calls. Assuming that we can substitute calls that are efficient, your program should run at regular speed. Moreover, we can integrate Windows programs and regular programs such that cut-and-paste operations work as expected.

(Other projects -- such as Bochs and to a certain extent Dosemu -- want to give you Windows running in an emulated PC. We wish them luck, but for this particular purpose we don't think that is the right way to go. They will have to pay Microsoft for that Windows copy and the integration between programs will suffer.)

Wine, The Windows API Implementation Secondly, Wine is an implementation of the Windows API allowing you to compile Windows programs into Unix binaries -- if you have the source code, of course. Thus, Wine (Winelib, actually) is a GUI toolkit, but since we don't intend anyone to develop directly for it, we don't see it as competing with GTK, Motif, Qt, and you name it.

We hope that Winelib can help transfer usable, free Windows programs into the Linux world with only little work. We also hope that developers -- who might want to spend the money doing a real port -- could use Wine as a quick way of entering the Linux world with their already-written programs.

Status Wine already runs your favourites: FreeCell, Solitaire, WinMine, and MSHearts. (Hey, that was 90% of the reason to use Windows already -- way to go, :-) MS Words and Excel are close to being useful; for some versions and people, they already are. Success has been reported for the Power Point viewer, but Power Point proper still needs some work. Also, the Forte Agent news reader is reported to be functioning well enough to be useful. More information can be found right here.

Since many programs are build with toolkits like MFC, we believe we are "close" to getting a lot of programs working. Time will tell.

Problems There are three major problems in the Wine development: The Windows API is really, really big. Wine is thus a large scale operation. Luckily we can proceed one function at a time. Much of Windows is undocumented -- and programs depend on undocumented stuff. This is by far the worst problem. Implementation of some system call can be quite difficult when you have no clue what it does. In my humble opinion, the US Department of Justice should have demanded full disclosure of all documentation regarding all function calls ever called by a Microsoft application. (Recall that Explorer clearly was an application at the time it came out. The "integrated part of the OS" mumbo jumbo came later.) There really is no good reason why Microsoft's application writers should have such information denied competitors. Lack of Windows API knowledge. Many of the Wine developers don't know what they are doing, yours truthfully included. We have some Microsoft documentation, some books, lots of Unix experience. Then we start coding. This would work better if Microsoft's documentation was correct and complete, but it certainly isn't. Wine Development The Wine project operates a bit differently from other Linux projects. Developers tend to come and go. We live in USENET space although nowadays we also have the Wine HeadQuarters. (Sorry. We're not a multi-million enterprise; the /. effect will probably kick in sooner rather than later.) New versions come out biweekly and are edited by our fearless leader, Alexandre Julliard.

(PLUG type=shameless)Please help with Wine: test your favourite applications, regardless of whether Linux alternatives exist. Tell us what breaks and how. Better yet, send us patches for bugs and missing functions. Is it worth it? Well, read what Linus says about Wine:

Wine, on the other hand, is in my personal opinion one of the most important linux projects currently under development. The ability to seamlessly run windows binaries among linux applications (all showing on the screen at the same time, with cut-and-paste working between them and eventually even maybe some kind of drag-and-drop setup) would be a huge advantage, mainly because windows has what linux lacks: end-user applications.

Other benefits from participating in the Wine project:

• You will get the occasional junk email about alcoholic fluids made from grapes.
• The resident comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine troll will tell you that you are a member of one of the world's secret communist parties -- I kid you not! Their main activity seems to hinder Wine development, if our source can be trusted.
• "No, I am not playing games -- I am performing valuable testing of Wine."

Thank you for you time.

-- Morten Welinder, terra@diku.dk. A member of, but not speaking on behalf of the Wine team.

Wintermute wrote in to tell everyone that it is possible to get StarCraft to run under Wine . In a word Un-be-f**king-believable . Battle.net apparently doesn't work, but single player play is fine. I haven't even seen StarCraft yet, even though my Room Mate has a CD. I think installing wine just became a priority :) Check out This Page for details on how to make it happen.

Patrik R}dman INF wrote in to tell us that a New Version of Wine has hit the net. Grab it if you're into that sorta thing. I'm waiting until I can emulate Diablo personally. My guess is it'll be awhile before we have DirectX though *smile*