The Wine development team today announces the official launch by end of the final of the project, the platform that lets you run Windows applications on Unix-based systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris or Mac OSX. It was estimated date to release the first stable version of Wine, but the final was delayed a few days.

After 15 years of development with versions 0.x, gradually maturing software, making it stable, adding more functionality and compatibility, improved graphics and performance version after version ... It's funny that they have chosen the day it was also Firefox 3 announced, because obviously today (almost) all actors in the network will take the red panda.

Wine is an acronym for W ine I s N ot an E mulator because the definition specifies that the project is not an emulator but a relocation of the Win16 and Win32 API. Besides allowing to run applications written for Windows, Wine provides tools for porting code from one system to another.

Thanks to Wine users can run programs like Internet Explorer on Windows systems that are not very useful and necessary for example for developers of Web pages. It has also brought plenty of games to the desktop GNU / Linux, and enormous suites like Adobe Photoshop.

The platform is free software and vital to many users who need to use a program that has only the operating system version from Microsoft. On the official site have a huge list of supported applications, which now is temporarily offline.

Download Wine 1.1.17

Technorati Tags: Linux Emulation Software