Wine 1.5.0 begins new development cycle

The Wine project development team has published version 1.5.0 of its Windows API implementation. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, Wine 1.5.0 introduces several changes as the first fortnightly development version of what will eventually become a stable 1.6 release.

The inclusion of a new version of the Gecko rendering engine and the addition of partial support for using the Trash on Mac OS X systems are among the notable updates. Other changes include various MSXML improvements and support for path gradients in the GdiPlus graphical library, as well as fixes to 64-bit exception handling. A total of 80 bugs affecting various applications, including iTunes, LibreOffice and Skype, as well as games such as Portal 2, World of Warcraft and Star Trek Online, have also been fixed.

Based on the timelines for the previous 1.0, 1.2 and 1.4 releases, it will likely take approximately 18 to 24 months before the next major stable release, version 1.6, is ready. However, a stable point update, version 1.4.1, is expected to arrive in the coming weeks to close any bugs and major problems discovered in Wine 1.4.

Further information about this development build can be found in the release announcement and in the shortlog; at the time of writing, the Release Planning wiki has yet to be updated to reflect the new version. Wine 1.5.0 is available to download from the project's site and documentation is provided. The current stable release is Wine 1.4.0 from earlier this month.

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X by providing its own native replacements for Windows DLLs. The Wine Project is sponsored by CodeWeavers, which also shares its own code updates with the project. Source code for Wine is hosted on SourceForge and is licensed under the LGPLv2.1 or later.

See also:

• Wine 1.4 sports a redesigned audio stack, improved graphics rendering, a report from The H.

(crve)