Hot on the heels of FireFox 3.0 being released (have you downloaded it yet??), the Wine team has announced they’ve finally hit version 1.0!
The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road!
While compatibility is not perfect yet, thousands of applications have been reported to work very well. Check http://appdb.winehq.org to see the details for your favorite applications.
Congrats guys, it was a long time coming!!! For those who don’t know, in short, Wine allows you to run Windows programs in a Linux environment. Right from their about page:
Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.
The Wine project started in 1993 as a way to support running Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Bob Amstadt was the original coordinator, but turned it over fairly early on to Alexandre Julliard, who has run it ever since. Over the years, ports for other Unixes have been added, along with support for Win32 as Win32 applications became popular.
Cool, huh? Speaking of cool, check out the cake that Microsoft sent over to the FireFox crew:
Now that’s class! Those of you may remember that this same thing happened for the launch of FireFox 2:
Gotta love the sense of humor these guys have!
