Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Mac OS X, Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems.

Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator.

Here are some key features of "Wine":

Binary Compatibility:
· Loads Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP, Windows 3.x and DOS programs and libraries
· Win32 compatible memory layout, exception handling, threads and processes
· Designed for POSIX compatible operatings systems (eg. Linux and FreeBSD)
· "bug-for-bug" compatibility with Windows

Graphics:
· X11-based graphics allows remote display to any X terminal
· X11, TrueType (.ttf/.ttc) and Windows Bitmap (.fon) Fonts
· DirectX support for games (limited Direct3D support)
· Support for OpenGL based games and applications
· Printing via PostScript driver or legacy native Win16 printer drivers
· Enhanced Metafile (EMF) and Windows Metafile (WMF) driver
· Desktop-in-a-box or mixable windows
· Windows MultiMedia (WinMM) layer support with builtin codecs

Allows Windows program to interface with:
· Sound devices via ALSA, OSS, ARTS, JACK, and libaudio etc
· Multi-lingual keyboards and CJK input method support via XIM
· Modems, serial devices
· Networks (TCP/IP and IPX)
· ASPI Scanners
· Windows Tablets via XInput (eg. Wacom)

Wine API:
· Designed for source and binary compatibility with Win32 code
· Win32 API test suite to ensure compatibility
· Compilable on a wide range of C compilers
· Permits mixing of Win32 and POSIX code
· Permits mixing of ELF (.so) and PE (.dll/.exe) binaries in one address space
· Win32 compatible header files
· Automatically generated API documentation
· Resource compiler
· Message compiler
· IDL compiler
· Extensive Unicode support
· Internationalization -- Wine supports 16 languages
· Built-in debugger and configurable trace messages
· External memory checker support using Valgrind
· Sample programs

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Many crypto fixes, particularly on 64-bit.
· Improved DVD access on Mac OS.
· Several common controls improvements.
· Various HTML support improvements.
· More DIB optimizations.

Bugs fixed in 1.1.32:
· 2181 Civilization 2: crashes because of WM_SETFOCUS message
· 3047 CSpy/Tab: Cursor Select & Keyboard Navigation Not Implemente/ Not Working
· 5259 Delphi 1 app will not minimize with minus icon in desktop mode
· 6003 Steam: No scroll bars are shown
· 7042 Crash in Icewind Dale 1 when creating a character
· 9374 Ricochet Infinity window fills the screen when switching from fullscreen mode
· 9688 Thief: Deadly Shadows does not render text properly
· 10435 Portal 1.0: Portals don't always appear correctly (clipping plane / frustum not being respected?)
· 10525 HLSW 2 crashes at start
· 10970 Crazy Taxi crashes when "Now Loading" appears
· 11180 Unhandled exception: unimplemented function ntoskrnl.exe.IoQueryDeviceDescription called in 32-bit code
· 11424 Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) pane refresh
· 12171adding popupmenu to itself, then using finditem causes stack overflow
· 12245 Graphics skip in Deus Ex
· 12858 winmm: wave.ok test fails in PC-BSD but not Linux
· 13006 Xfire ListView shows blocks for text or white spaces
· 13261 Civilization III Crashes When Starting New Game
· 13422 Age of Conan patcher doesn't draw anything
· 13501 Rome Total War v1.5: Crashes everytime when entering a battle.
· 13514 Age of Conan will not start
· 13547 Warcraft III loses all textures after game window loses focus in OpenGL mode
· 13576Black Hawk Down Demo causes wine to exit upon entering map
· 13800 Examdiff crashes
· 14005 Debugger Detected [304]
· 14267C++ runtime error when playing icewind dale2
· 15155 Cortex Command builds 20, 21 immediately terminate upon startup
· 15273 Civilization 4 installer fails with error -5009
· 15312 Visual Studio 2005 requires SetDIBits to handle a NULL DC and DIB_RGB_COLORS
· 16033 Metal Gear Solid I Bug
· 17211 Proteus 6 Lite (Ares.exe & Isis.exe) both crash upon opening a design.
· 17497 Xfire crashes with latest version (1.104)
· 17530 netapi32:access crashes if +heap enabled
· 17584 VB6 Textbox crash
· 17605 Google Sketchup 7 crashes on file save
· 17760 CryptAcquireContext: Use MS_ENHANCED_PROV instead of MS_DEF_PROV when pszProvider == NULL
· 17768 7Zip rebar crash
· 17777 WinPolis hangs when sound is enabled
· 17810 Base unittests for chromium don't run to completion under Wine
· 17813 Net unittests for chromium fail under Wine
· 17905 PDF-XChange Viewer mouse pointer drop shadow
· 17964 Red Alert 3 Uprising crashes during install
· 17974 Garry's mod: screen on toolgun isn't rendered
· 17994 Failure in D3D8 test in test function texop_test
· 18000user32 test run failure
· 18055 Searching in Steam does not work.
· 18067 RtlAllocateHeap leaks memory in the small->large path
· 18297 Easybooks crashes
· 18438 Installation of ArcGIS 9.3 on Wine 1.1.21 at C:/ArcGIS fails and exit
· 18480 Civilization III 1.29f will not start game.
· 18573 Unimplemented function KERNEL32.dll.QueryFullProcessImageNameA
· 19064 Microsoft Security Essentials Setup crashes missing QueryAllTracesW
· 19091 Missing background in Civilization 4 main menu.
· 19188 [Close Combat Iv][CC4] All versions fail to launch
· 19468 SimCity 4 Deluxe is showing an error messages when starting
· 19629 BFVietnam 1.1: Fog rendering incorrectly
· 19702 Atlas der Schweiz does not start anymore
· 19819 Small bug in TranslateCharsetInfo
· 19932 Steam web browser scrolls to end when mouse is out of window
· 20130 CDRoller: Can't start because debugger is detected.
· 20184 eXperience112 don`t work
· 20188 MSN Messenger 7.5 hangs while signing in
· 20212 AutoCAD 2009: unimplemented function dwmapi.dll.DwmGetTransportAttributes
· 20285 cmd.exe does not treat tabs as parameter delimiters
· 20304 Warcraft 3 stats lagging very bad in-game after about 10 minutes if you are not host
· 20310 Game Original War doesn't look well because of broken transparency
· 20313 Patch "user32: Draw the whole button only if requested" caused uninitialized memory use
· 20317 Uninitialised memory reference in SetEntriesInAclW()
· 20325 Month calendar control does not send MCN_SELCHANGE when changing month
· 20334 SysReAllocStringLen should return null terminated strings
· 20341 pcsx2 beta: crashes when exiting LilyPad configuraiton dialog
· 20365 Radio Mobile icons drawn too big
· 20368 sockaddr_in6 wrong size; causes chromium's net_unittests HostResolverImplTest.NumericIPv6Address test case to fail
· 20370 chromium net_unittests.exe fail ssl tests because they can't check for root cert
· 20372 WS2_register_async_shutdown forgets to initialize local_iosb.Information to zero?
· 20399 MPLAB 8.40 crashes
· 20430 widl generating proxies and stubs with uninitialized variables?
· 20437 winemenubuilder produces wrong mimetype files
· 20440 RM2k3 Event Editor works very slow