Wine 1.1.44 Brings All Sorts Of Changes

Two weeks ago Wine 1.1.43 was released and it brought many Direct3D fixes, among other improvements, but this Friday Wine 1.1.44 has superseded that release. Wine 1.1.44 does carry more Direct3D 9/10 work, but it also packs a fair amount of other changes.

As mentioned at WineHQ.org, Wine 1.1.44 offers up many new icons, support for 32-bit prefixes with 64-bit Wine, many additional msvcr80/90 functions, improvements to Bidi handling, more complete mmdevapi (Windows 7 audio) support, improved handling of MSI patches, many desktop menu fixes, optimizations in OLE storage, and various bug-fixes.

Overall this looks like another exciting Wine development release as they strive to implement more Windows functionality and eventually make it towards a Wine 1.2 release. In the near future we will be offering up a new set of Wine vs. Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, similar to this week's article (the first in a series) covering Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks. Next week we will also be tossing Mac OS X 10.6.3 into the mix.

As was recently brought up on the Wine-devel list, we will also be launching a Wine performance tracker in the near future similar to our Ubuntu Tracker and Linux Kernel Tracker that monitor the performance of the respective components on a daily basis and in a fully autonomous manner across multiple systems in our test farm.