ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

It looks like Wine's time has finally come: Version 1.0 of the Windows emulation software is now slated for a June release. And Linux users almost certainly have Google -- or, at least, Google's money -- to thank for moving things along.

At this point, Wine has been in development nearly 15 years. No, that's not a typo, and there shouldn't be a decimal between the 1 and 5. Of course, for most of that time, Wine was an all-volunteer effort; even at the best of times, the project was often sorely lacking in QA resources.

Codeweavers, which now sponsors Wine development and uses the software as the basis for its own Crossover Linux product, certainly helped to pick up the development pace: Today, Wine supports nearly 1,300 Windows apps to one degree or another, including outstanding support for Adobe Photoshop CS2.

Photoshop support is probably the most important Windows software that most Linux users want to run, and improving Wine's Photoshop support was one of the main reasons why Google decided to open its wallet for Codeweavers earlier this year. But Google's financial support probably also explains why the Wine QA team is moving steadily through its final pre-1.0 release tasks, including around 100 bugs (most of them minor) that still need to be fixed and tested.

Besides Photoshop CS2, the Wine dev team will also focus on making sure that Microsoft's PowerPoint, Word, and Excel viewers work without a hitch in the version 1.0 release. And as anyone who uses Crossover Linux already knows, Microsoft Office XP/2003 and Internet Explorer already work incredibly well on desktop Linux systems