News

Alexandre released a new version of Wine today with the following changes noted:

• Initial implementation of a true Richedit control.
• Shell extension for browsing Unix directories.
• More MSI work.
• PBuffer support in OpenGL.
• Window painting regressions should be fixed.
• Lots of bug fixes

Binary packages are in the process of being built, but the source is available now. Read more about this release, or just go download it.

In belated news, we've updated some pages on WineHQ. Tom Wickline reviewed and made some changes to Wine's status pages To get a feel for the progress, check out the status page changelog. Dimi Paun went through the to do list and marked a few tasks as complete. Finally, we had a janitorial task marked as complete to use Interlocked functions in AddRef and Release methods.

According to Microsoft, Wine ranks as the number one cross-platform API translation technology:

"As the most popular third-party translation technology in use, Wine was the first emulator to be specifically tested for via WGA" - Microsoft spokesperson

Feel the love.

We're on the radar screen.

Microsoft's new Windows Genuine Advantage program seeks to curb software piracy by allowing downloads only to licensed copies of their operating systems. To do this, an executable named GenuineCheck.exe (MD5 hash = 05499eaa4d4f55af32f5b14561ee7e55) gets downloaded if you go to their website with Firefox. If you happen to look at the strings in that file, you'll notice a reference to a registry key that looks curiously familiar: SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config. That little string, albeit subtle, happens to be the first Wine-specific test Microsoft has made in a program.

Any developers from Redmond wishing to report bugs in Wine are encouraged to use our Bugzilla database.

This month's CVS snapshot is out. Alexandre noted the following additions:

• Still more work on the MSI dll.
• More OLE work, including a builtin stdole32.tlb.
• Fixed inter-process window resize and repaint.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Binary packages are in the process of being built, but the source is available now. Read more about this release, or just go download it.

WineConf 2005 is coming to Europe! Mark your calendars for April 30th and May 1st and start making travel arrangements. This year's WineConf is being hosted by the University of Stuttgart's Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering. For more info, see the WineConf 2005 web pages. We're currently working on arranging some lodging options, please let us know as soon as possible if you plan on attending.

A new CVS snapshot with the following additions came out this week:

• Many OLE bug fixes and improvements.
• A lot more work on the MSI dll.
• Update regions now handled in the Wine server.
• Beginnings of typelib generation in the IDL compiler.
• Many janitorial cleanups.

Most binary packages have already been put together or you can compile the source yourself. Read more about this release, or just go download it.

Just in time for Christmas, CodeWeavers has released version 4.1 of CrossOver Office. No new applications are supported, but you'll find a lot of bugfixes for existing ones. That includes some big updates to improve iTunes performance. For more information, read the announcement or go take a look at the changelog.

We added an acknowledgement page last week to WineHQ. We'd like to thank everyone over the years who have made significant contributions to Wine.

Last week also saw more AppDB changes. Have you signed up yet to be an application maintainer?

Finally, Vincent Béron created a new download page for Red Hat based distros. Hopefully that will sort out some of the confusion concerning the sheer number of packages available.