Wine 1.2 adds support for 64-bit applications

More than two years after version 1.0 arrived and about one month behind schedule, the Wine Project development team have released version 1.2 of their Windows API implementation. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native replacements for Windows DLLs. According to Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, Wine 1.2 represents more than 23,000 changes, including over 3,000 bug fixes, and includes a number of improvements and new features.

The second major stable release of Wine features support for 64-bit Windows applications on x86-64 processors, better standard dialogues and new graphics based on the Tango standard. Other improvements include enhanced Direct3D support, implementation of the XDG standard for application start up notification, support for symbolic links in the registry and sub-pixel font rendering. The next update to Wine will be version 1.2.1, a bug fix release for Wine 1.2 that will not include any new features. Wine 1.3 will become the new development branch, with bi-weekly snapshots building towards a future 1.4 release.

More details about the release, including a full list of new features, can be found in the official release announcement. Wine 1.2 is available to download from one of the project's mirrors and documentation is provided. Wine source code is available from SourceForge and is licensed under the LGPL.

See also:

• Wine release 1.2, a WineHQ mailing list announcement.

(crve)