Wine 1.4 Released

vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."

Comments

Re:Blast from the past

[Cornwallis]

i've been using it within Fedora and Mint with Office 2003 and Photoshop (and previously with Dreamweaver) and had no problems. I would say my experience is that the applications have been running faster than under Virtualbox - which I do use for testing builds on a fairly regular basis. YMMV.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Those need a Windows license. Wine doesn't.

Great, sometimes

[brunes69]

When Wine works well, it is far superior to running the app in a VM, for a number of reasons

- Performance - When an app runs well under Wine, it runs as fast as it does under Windows on the same machine, or sometimes it runs even faster. Running under a VM is never as fast as running native on the same hardware.

- Desktop integration - When an app is installed under Wine, it automatically integrates with your GNOME/KDE desktop... the application is available in the menu, same window manager, etc. Yes there are solutions for this under VMs like VMWare Fusion, but it is not as clean and frankly usually is buggy as all get out.

When an app runs in Wine well, I prefer to run it that way over a VM. VMs are much better though to be sure the app is running the exact way it was meant to run.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[impaledsunset]

Debian hasn't packaged 1.2 yet, these are third-party packages.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=585409

Apparently one of the issues why the newer versions can't be packaged is that the maintainer wants to package and upload all versions between the last one and 1.4 in order. Since nobody has the time to do so, there isn't any progress towards packaging the newer ones.

Wine is $200 cheaper

[tepples]

With fast machines, loads of ram and virtual machines I am not sure what the point of wine is anymore.

You still to buy a $200 copy of retail Windows for the Mac or home-built desktop PC on which you run Windows inside a virtual machine. Xubuntu + Wine is cheaper than Windows, and Mac OS X + Wine is cheaper than Mac OS X + Windows.

Code sharing

[DrYak]

The ReactOS and the Wine project share a lot of code (most of the userspace libraries. Consider ReactOS as a Wine userland + WinNT-like kernel). So therefore, the day ReactOS is actually a complete OS that can run 100% of windows software, is also the day that Wine can run all the Windows software too.