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June 12, 2008

Wine is a special application that will let you run Windows programs on Linux and Unix and now it's almost ready for its 1.0 release. As you might expect, the Linux community is getting ready for it an it has some all excited.

If all goes as initially planned, Alexandre Julliard, Wine's lead developer, says that Wine 1.0 should be ready in about two weeks. While at this point there are about 1,300 Windows applications that will install and run on Wine to some degree or another, only four sets of Windows applications -- Photoshop CS2, PowerPoint Viewer 97 and 2003, Word Viewer 97 and 2003, and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003 -- are considered critical for the 1.0 release.

Largely based on volunteer efforts, Wine has always lacked the resources for comprehensive quality and assurance testing. The fact that it is open source may be a blessing as well as a curse...

This problem is even bigger than it appears since there are so many different Windows environments, Windows applications, and as many of you already know, there are already many different Linux distributions. Wine has spent so many years in testing in large part because it must replace poorly documented Windows application program interfaces (API), which vary wildly from one release of Windows to another.

Julliard says "there are a huge number of Windows applications out there, and while most people only need one or two, they all need a different one or two. So for a credible 1.0 we need to support a broad range of applications, which means we can't take any shortcuts in our implementation, since any shortcut is bound to break some application somewhere..."

Julliard added "there are several reasons it has taken Wine so long to get to this point: the Windows API is huge, not well documented, and full of tricky behaviors and side effects that applications depend on. It's also a moving target, as Microsoft keeps adding new features and pushing developers to adopt them.

Additionally, finding what goes wrong with an application is sometimes difficult, since we don't have access to the application source code, we can't easily see what confuses it."

Jeremy White is CEO of Wine's commercial sibling, CodeWeavers, creators of Crossover Linux and Mac, programs that make it easy to use Wine on Linux and Mac OS X. White says, "I think people don't realize just how very hard Wine is. We're completely recreating Windows from the ground up. Microsoft, with their tens of thousands of employees, has a hard time shipping a new release of Windows that is backwards compatible *cough* Vista *cough*. So imagine then, instead, a scrappy band of volunteers replicating that work with a fraction of the people."

As Wine has matured, its reach has extended beyond ordinary office applications to games as well. For example, the popular World of Warcraft and Guild Wars online games now work well with Wine.

It wasn't easy. For the first five years of Wine's development it was pretty much a completely volunteer operation. The core developers decided to tackle bringing Windows programs to Linux because, Julliard says, "It was in the early days of Linux, and among the early adopters it was clear that this new system had a lot of promise, but of course it didn't have any end user applications, while Windows had lots. So it was a fairly obvious question: how can we use all these applications?

"The original crew was Bob Amstadt, Peter MacDonald, Eric Youngdale, and myself," Julliard says. We put together a prototype to run a 'hello world' Windows app, and this showed that the concept was viable. Then we moved on to Solitaire and then to bigger things.... Bob Amstadt was the maintainer for the first year of the project, but then didn't have time for it anymore, so I took over."

Wine was even started before Windows 95 appeared (!) so the first target for Wine's developers was the Windows 3.1 16-bit API. Wine's first big success, according to Julliard, was "when we got Microsoft Office to run, about four years into the project (it was the 16-bit version of Office at the time), that was the first proof that our goals were reachable."

"Of course then 16-bit apps quickly got replaced by 32-bit ones, and that set us back a few years as we had to switch our core design to 32 bits," added Julliard.

The next big step forward came three years ago when Apple introduced the Mac architecture to the Intel processor. This opened up a whole new market for Wine, and CodeWeavers started to invest in porting Wine to Mac OS X. Wine's biggest kick in the pants may have come in 2006 when Google got involved. White says, "This is actually a remarkable story of how much impact one person can have, because the honest truth is that for all that it's cool to say that Google is involved, what's really helped is that Dan Kegel, who happens to work at Google got involved in the project head on."

Looking ahead, Julliard sees a lot more work ahead for the Wine crew. "There are a lot of things we want to support: USB devices, 64-bit apps, .Net apps, user interface themes, a Mac OS native interface, etc. Then of course all the new functions that Microsoft will keep coming up with, and all the remaining incompatibilities in the ones we have implemented already."

Source: Information Age.

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