Wine (software)

Wine, a recursive acronym and at the same time Apronym for " Wine Is Not an Emulator " ( English for " Wine is not an emulator ") is a Windows - compatible runtime environment for POSIX compatible operating systems.

Properties

With Wine, it is possible many programs that have been compiled for the Microsoft Windows operating systems to run on Unix with the X Window System.

Wine can be used without a Windows installation. Some libraries are not fully implemented yet, but Wine can use DLLs to an existing Windows version to improve compatibility with Windows applications.

Wine is still under development, and some much-used Windows applications are not supported in their overall functionality; particularly in multimedia and 3D graphics there are larger incompatibilities. The OpenGL implementation, however, is advanced, so that even some better-known 3D games run with a smaller difference in performance. Also some problems with copy-protected programs and games have been fixed.

On the official Wine site there is a list of applications running under Wine.

In addition to the runtime environment and application programming interface, which form the basis of Wine, and Windows components such as the file manager Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer web browser to be rebuilt.

Availability

In contrast to developed in closed-source Windows API source code of Wine, and the documentation with examples is publicly available and may be used freely under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License ( LGPL), modified and distributed (even in modified state).

Wine runs on POSIX operating systems such as Linux, Solaris and BSD variants. There are ready-made software packages for popular Linux distributions, some BSD derivatives, Mac OS X ( on Intel hardware ) and Windows, which can be obtained from the Wine project page. As the Wine source code is freely available, the program can also be installed on Linux-/Unix-Systemen for which there are no ready packages. For all popular Linux distributions, it can be installed directly from the standard repositories.

History

Bob Amstadt (the original coordinator of the Wine project ) and Eric Youngdale initiated the Wine project in 1993. As a special incentive to the developers at the time were the successes of Sun Microsystems Wabi, which had a higher performance when running Windows programs on Solaris than under a native Windows 3.x environment. The original objective was to support programs for Windows 3.x ( 16-bit) full. Currently, the focus of development lies in the now dominant Win32 applications. Since June 1994 Alexandre Julliard is leading the project.

Originally Wine is released under the MIT license, but after disputes about Cedega, a proprietary elimination of Wine that did not return their advancements in Wine, Wine is available since March 2002 under the GNU Lesser General Public License ( LGPL).

Mid- 2002, the body written in C source code for more than one million rows, the end of 2007, there were already nearly two million lines. The project involves more than 1,000 amateur and professional programmers are involved, which are scattered throughout the world. Currently (as of August 2011) are supported about 90 percent of the system calls, thus a variety of programs under Wine can run. The currently not supported system calls perform, particularly in specialized applications such as computer games, to problems. Wine is after 15 years still in the development stage, about every two weeks a new version is available for download. On 25 October 2005, the first beta version, which was given the version number 0.9 was released. On 17 June 2008, Version 1.0 was released, but a full implementation of the Windows API, this represents not represent The main criteria for the 1.0 version had the support of Adobe Photoshop 9.0 ( CS2) and the viewers of Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint versions 97 and 2003. version 1.4 was released on March 7, 2012, and provides support for Microsoft Office 2010 and a.

Wine is primarily designed for and under Linux, but can just as well to compile it yourself for other Unix-like systems such as Mac OS X, Solaris, or BSD, and even for non- Unix-like systems such as OpenVMS or Windows. In addition, a large part of the Wine libraries to the Windows API has been integrated into the operating system ReactOS.

Beginning in February 2014 it was announced that there are efforts to make Wine on Android, based on Linux, run. This development is still in a very early stage.

Function

Wine is not an emulator, but merely an implementation of the functions of the Windows API on GNU / Linux and other Unix -like operating systems represents the system calls are passed to the Linux or Unix kernel and the X Window System. So it is possible that the exported via Wine programs can run as under the original operating system just as fast.

Wine may Win16, Win32 and Win64 APIs from DOS (MS- DOS ), Windows 3.1 Getting to Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. The degree of support for the various Windows applications varies by age and unused API parts: Versions earlier than Windows XP are good and almost fully supported. At some newer features of Windows 7, or 8 and Direct3D is worked out by the developers yet. Since most Windows application programs that require all the functions of the Windows API, many are fully usable in spite of incomplete API.

Variants

  • PlayOnLinux Gui for Wine
  • Cedega (formerly winex )
  • Darwine (now WineBottler ) - for Mac OS X
  • ReactOS - uses a part of the Wine libraries to avoid duplication of development work
  • ReWind (now merged into Cedega )
  • Wineskin Winery

Similar systems

  • Cygwin is in a sense the counterpart, will run under Windows with the Linux programs.
Proprietary software Cedega (software) Fork (software development) Compiler Android (operating system) MS-DOS Windows 3.1x
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