http://www.desktoplinux.com/

For far longer than any of its developers would care to recall, Wine, the best program to use in Linux to run Windows applications, has been in development. Now, at long last, Wine 1.0 is scheduled to be released.

To be exact, Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.0 should appear June 6, on the project’s 15th birthday. While at this point there are 1,229 Windows applications that install and run out of the box, the Platinum applications, using Wine on Linux, only four Microsoft applications – Photoshop CS2, PowerPoint Viewer 97 and 2003, and Word Viewer 97 and 2003, and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003 – are being considered as critical for the 1.0 release. The reason for this, the Wine developers explain in the Wine 1.0 release plan, is that “expanding that list is that each new app adds a huge amount of testing to each release.”

Wine, based on volunteer efforts, has always lacked the resources for comprehensive quality and assurance testing. This problem is magnified by the wide variety of Windows environments, Windows applications and Linux distributions. Indeed, much of the reason why Wine has spent so much time in beta is because it tries to bring rhyme and reason to poorly documented Windows API (application program interfaces), which vary wildly from one release of Windows to another.

Despite this handicap, over the years Wine and its commercial sibling, Crossover Linux, have long been successful in making it possible for Linux users to run Windows applications on their PC. For example, the core Microsoft Office XP and 2003 applications and Internet Explorer have long worked without a hitch on Linux.

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 MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) run quite well with Wine.

In addition, Google is funding CodeWeavers, the company behind Crossover Linux, to improve Wine’s support of Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2. Dan Kegel, who is both on a Google software engineering team and is the Wine 1.0 release manager, explained in a recent blog posting, “Photoshop is one of those applications that Desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we’re happy to say they work pretty well now.” Google already uses Wine for its Linux version of its own simple photo-management program, Picasa.

This financial support for Wine support of one of the programs that many Linux users want to see on Linux is helping to get Wine over the 1.0 hurdle. Only about 100 bugs remain on the Bugs targeted for the Wine 1.0 release list. Most of these are relatively minor and, with three months to go, none of them appear to be show-stoppers.

With any luck at all, Wine 1.0 should actually see the light of day in early June. Linux users, who have long used Wine to run those pesky must-have Windows programs, will undoubtedly be pleased to see the release.