Wine: Not Another Emulator - Wine: a history lesson
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From the beginning I should tell you that Wine is not a user-friendly application. At least, not yet. Wine is still in development, and therefore focuses more on offering functions rather than being user-friendly. So using the terminal and modifying files to get programs working is an everyday job with Wine. Still, version1.0 was launched last year on June 17, 2008 so it is time to see what it can achieve.
We'll pick up our narrative in 1993. By this time Windows had started to get its claws on the operating system market. Its share doubled with the failure of the IBM with the OS/2. This failure was recognized by IBM adding built-in support for the MS OS. But in 1992 Sun, via the Paraxys Technologies studio, started to develop Wabi.
Wabi's capabilities were demonstrated in 1993. It offered support for the Solaris X86 and 2.2 for Sparc operating systems to run out-of-the-box Windows applications. In 1993, after a short conversation between a few Linux developers, it was decided that something similar was required for the new Unix-based OS as well.
Early members of the project included Eric Yongdale, David Metcalfe, Migual de Icazc and Alexandre Julliard, who took it over a year later and has been its leader ever since. The initial objective was to take Windows 16-bit binaries and execute them on Linux. After just six months of development, Solitaire was running. Also in 1993, the first port to NetBSD was made, thanks to a patch uploaded by John Brezac.
Currently there are versions for most of the Unix-based systems (included the MAC OS X) and even Windows as well. Everything got a little more complicated after Microsoft extended its applications to 32 bit in 1995. This meant it was no longer possible to just load and execute the binaries.
New mechanics had to be added, like the networking and registry file systems. In 1998 Corel started to sponsor the team, as it intended to provide Linux systems that are easy to install and use. The main objective was to make Corel Office run via Wine.
During this period some internal teams also worked to improve Wine; later on they formed Xandros. In 2001, following a massive investment in Corel from Microsoft, the company abandoned its support. The gap left behind was filled by Codeweavers, who had also helped the project early on.
Codeweavers's intention is to use Wine to improve its CrossOver application. Still, some of this differs from the usual picture of Wine, so the two projects, although they share a good amount of their data, continues to run separately.
WineX was formed in the next period, with the objective of offering DirectX support, and with it, to run Windows games under Unix systems. In 2003 the DLL separation system was finally achieved.
Native DLLs can be used; however, to use the Windows DLLs, a license is required -- unless the application brings the dynamic library with it. Up to this time Wine has grown to more than 1.4 million lines of code and more than 1000 contributors. That is a huge effort from a large community.
