2 Overview

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2.1 What is Wine, and what is it supposed to do?

Wine is both a program loader and an emulation library that will allow Unix users to run MS Windows applications on an x86 hardware platform running under some Unixes. The program loader will load and execute an MS Windows application binary, while the emulation library will take calls to MS Windows functions and translate these into calls to Unix/X, so that equivalent functionality is achieved.

MS Windows binaries will run directly; there will be no need for machine level emulation of program instructions. Sun has reported better performance with their version of WABI than is actually achieved under MS Windows, so theoretically the same result is possible under Wine.

2.2 What does the word Wine stand for?

The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best.

2.3 What is the current version of Wine?

A new version of Wine will be distributed almost every week, usually on a Saturday or Sunday. You will be able to keep up on all the latest releases by reading the newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.

When downloading Wine from your ftp site of choice (see question getwine for some of these choices), you can make sure you are getting the latest version by watching the version numbers in the distribution filename. For instance, the distribution released on June 20, 1994 was called Wine-940620.tar.gz.

Weekly patches are also available. If you are current to the previous version, you can download and apply just the current patch file rather than the entire new distribution. The patch filenames follow the same conventions as the weekly distribution, so watch those version numbers!

2.4 When will Wine be ready for general distribution?

Because Wine is being developed solely by volunteers, it is difficult to predict when it will be ready for general distribution. Between 90-98% of the functions used by MS Windows applets, and 80-90% of the functions used by major programs, have been at least partially implemented at this time. However, the remaining 10% will likely take another 90% of the time, not including debugging.

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