WINE or WINE Is Not an Emulator, is not “forever alpha/beta” as it was jokingly introduced by WINE users. Yes, after two years of active development, version 1.2 is now officially available for download, replacing the 0-stable branch.
With over 23,000 changes; 3,000 bug fixes; and the much awaited 64-bit support, this makes WINE even more useful for all GNU/Linux users, especially gamers and those who are having a hard time making a switch from their favorite Windows-only application to a (better) FLOSS application.
Follow up:
Here are some of the changes that are, in my opinion, very important.
COre functionality
- Loading and running 64-bit Windows applications is now supported on x86-64 processors (only on Linux at this point)
- There are now two flavors of WINE prefixes, 32-bit and 64-bit. 32-bit prefixes only support 32-bit applications, while 64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.
- The mount manager now reports the actual UUID for disk devices that support it instead of a hard-coded one
- Symbolic links are now supported in the registry
- The C runtime libraries msvcr80, msvcr90, and msvcr100 used by recent Visual C++ versions are now partially implemented
- Some functions now use a Microsoft-compatible function prologue when building with a recent enough gcc. This allows Steam overlays to work.
User Interface
- The standard print and page setup dialogs are now working much better now
- There is now an application wizard control panel to manage installed applications
- There is now a proper user interface for importing, exporting, and managing cryptographic keys and certificates
- WINE is now fully translated to French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean. It has partial translations for another twenty languages.
Desktop integration
- File associations created by a Windows application are now registered with the Unix desktop
- Start Menu entries are now properly removed when an application is uninstalled
- Copying and pasting images between Windows and Unix applications works more reliably now, and more image formats are supported
- Launching an external Unix web browser from a Windows application now works correctly
- MSI files are now associated with WINE to enable launching them directly from the desktop
- The virtual desktop window now switches to full-screen mode when its size matches that of the screen
Graphics
- The windowscodecs dll has been added, with codecs for the JPEG/JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, ICO, and TIFF image formats
- Many functions are now implemented in GDIPlus. The gdiplus dll is now considered good enough to load the built-in version by default.
- Overlays are now supported in DirectDraw
Audio
- The ALSA sound driver now works better with PulseAudio’s ALSA emulation
- Digital playback of audio CDs is now supported
Internet and networking
- The HTTP protocol implementation has seen many improvements, two in particular is support for IPv6 addresses and better certificate validation on secure connections
- The Gecko HTML engine has been updated to a more recent upstream version. Many more HTML objects are now implemented
- There is now an essentially complete implementation of the JavaScript language
- Many undocumented functions in the shlwapi dll have been implemented for improved Internet Explorer support
Direct3D
- A large portion of the d3d×9 dlls is now implemented, most notably the shader assembler, .x file support, functions for fonts, general 3D math, mesh handling, and sprites. A start has been made with the texture and effect functions.
- Fog handling has improved a lot
- The graphics card detection code has been improved, and many more graphics cards are now recognized
- User clip planes are now supported in shaders. This allows proper water reflections in Half-Life 2
- There is now an initial implementation of Direct3D 10, including the dxgi, d3d10core, and d3d10 dlls. Most of the work so far has gone into parsing d3d10 effects and SM4 shaders
- Shadow samplers are now properly supported. This fixes shadows in StarCraft II
- Many new OpenGL extensions are now supported
For the complete list, visit the official announcement.
And to download, simply head to WINE Official Download page.