An anonymous reader sent us a link to a fairfax article where you can read an Interview with Corel's Michael Cowpland. Talks about Open Source, the Netwinder division's sale to HCC, WINE, and Corel's commitment to putting their Suite on Linux by Dec. 99.

Caballero writes " Not only is 2.2 pre 9 available. The version number in the Makefile is listed as 2.2.0-final! It also includes support for the new SGI visual workstation." We're almost there now kids. Chill the wine (or just get out the shot glasses)

Oopy writes "There's an article in Monday's NYT all about WINE. Seems pretty good. " Comments on application compatibility (and mentions that Star Craft has a 4.6). How many apps do you need besides that anyway?

In a recent e-mail conversation with Timur Tabi (of Win32-OS/2), I asked him about opening the source to Win32-OS/2 and collaborating with the Wine crew. For instance win32-OS/2 has some Direct X support, allowing Quake 2 3D-Now, and Destruction Derby II to run. And this was his reply: "We have already announced our intent to release the source code as well as use code from WINE. The announcement was made at Warpstock". Timur gave the Win32-OS/2 speech at Warpstock. update In related news, Wine 990110's out.

zootsuite writes "After an end of year coding rush, Wine-990103 has been released. Any bets on when Microsoft will stop making operating systems, and stick to the apps? "

Martin Hock writes " This guy, Steve Gibson, who is phat enough to write everything in assembly language, but not phat enough to run Linux, has created a nifty freeware (beer, not speech) program for Windoze called Free & Clear that demos the way Microsoft's ClearType "may" work by employing color fringing. Only interesting if you have a color LCD display, or possibly if you have an extremely precise aperture grill. On my Libretto, it's pretty funky fresh. He claims that it works with Virtual PC, but I'd be impressed if someone got it to work under Wine, because we all know how much X loves fonts... I've given it a quick spin with the Non-Emulator myself and it looks trashy. " Is anyone up to porting this bugger? The page is excellent because it explains all sorts of interesting things about the technology in question, including the fact that it has been around for 22 years longer than Microsoft seems to want us to believe.

Vincent Renardias writes "Tor Lillqvist has recently tried to port The Gimp on Win32; and not only it works great under Windows 95/98/NT, but it also runs under Linux (Screenshot!) thanks to the Wine emulator.
Now who will dare do say there are no usefull applications running under Wine? ;) " That is amusing.

John Goerzen writes "In a small press release, Corel reports that there were 82,925 Linux downloads in 12 hours. Corel president & CEO Cowpland said, "We have proven that the Linux community wants access to commercial, mainstream applications. . . and we intend to deliver them." (emphasis mine). Corel also has an interesting site on Linux." S: The actual quote was of attempted downloads, but the number is quite reasonable. Hopefully this will keep Corel motivated in porting all the apps they promised a while back. Any news of their anticipated contributions to Wine?

Stephen Birch writes "I have just been informed by Intuit support that they will consider a port of QuickBooks and Quicken to Linux if there is sufficient demand for the product on that platform. They told me that if I leave a suggestion, they WILL get back to me to discuss the suggestion. Sounds like the slashdot effect may be put to good use to request a Linux port of these popular products? " Normally, we try not to post pointers to polls and things like this, but I think there is a legit desire/market here. Quicken is, without a doubt, the most frequontly mentioned app I hear people wishing would run under WINE. But think long and hard before putting a request in the suggestion box.

The Alchemist wrote in to say that Lotus Notes 4.6a now runs on Wine-981109. Also, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote in to say "Great news! WINE Office 97! Both Winword and Excel work. Not perfect, but at least you can type :-) Older version supported Word 2.0 and 6.0, but at last the WINE team is "up to speed". And even before Corel is coming in..." I see bright shiny things in our future, like maybe I can get addicted to Diablo again...

Jamie Katz writes "Another fairly substantial instance of a big computer company helping out some good Ooen Source software: Corel will use WINE to port it's applications to Linux; in the process of doing this, Corel will hack WINE to make it work better. "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project."" It's all in the apps guys. This is a great bridge to get the mainstream over here. Great news.

frokost writes "There is an editorial at freshmeat written by Jim Gettys, one of the original authors of X. Very interesting, indeed." S: Jim's idea of cross-toolkit themes should be extended to Wine: many companies will use Wine to port to Linux, simply because there are a lot of Win32 capable programmers out there. Wine will therefore be one of the important GUI toolkits out there. I also agree with his point that WIMP is step 1. Voice recognition is step 2. Right now, Linux GUI standards are in very rapid development, which makes it the right time for a voice recognition standard to be built and added so that apps may be designed/reworked early to include voice-recognition. Some work similar to what he's talking about has been done by IBM, such as a browser to help blind users surf the web.

Justin Bradford writes "Corel announced on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine that they plan to use WineLib (the library side of WINE, the open source Windows emulator) to port all of their products. Here's what Gavriel State (gavriels@corel.com), Linux porting team leader, had to say: "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project. Once our exploration and evaluation has settled down a bit (read: we've cleaned up our hacks), we'll begin submitting patches to Alexandre to review and commit to the CVS tree. We'll be spending some effort on getting the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running under Wine, but our primary focus will be on porting ou WordPerfect Suite 9 applications using WineLib. We'll also begin participating publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can contribute our ideas as well as our code. You should be seeing a lot more of us in the future."" S: What is of particular interest to me is that they have already coded a Win32-on-MacOS library when they ported CorelDraw to the Mac. This means Corel has very valuable expertise in the Win32-emulation area.

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious.

A.C. writes "I guess somebody finally tried it - you can play Unreal in Linux via WINE! Posted on Linux Games with a screenshot to prove it! " So is this a hoax? I sure hope not.

Anonymous to Avoid Corporate Wrath writes "Writing a whole new GUI for all the apps is likely to be pretty intractable for me alone, so I am trying to investigate the porting tool options further. Can any tell me of a useful Win->Linux porting path that supports MFC and DCOM?" Interesting question! Click below for more...

Ramon van Handel has written a summary of the Freedows project for everyone to read. He talks about what it is, where it is going, and tries to address some of the major concerns that folks have expressed about it.

Bristol is a small company that makes a cross platform tool which enables Windows programs to run under Unix. Unlike Wine they use Microsoft's Windows source code. Now they are suing Microsoft for illegally using its operating system monopoly power to undermine the competing Unix market, according to their lawsuit. What's interesting is that Sybase submitted an affidavit in Bristol's favour. Perhaps now they'd be interested in helping/funding Wine?

Morten has written in with an excellent summary of the Wine project, and an updated status report. This is definately a critical project and deserves attention. Click below to read what he has to say about it.

Allright I know I said no more Gnome/KDE stuff, but Bruce Perens asked me to post this, and its worth reading. Now I'm going to be frank here guys, keep the comments under control. I know this is a hot issue, but think before you post. This issue is a major schism, and we need to solve it, not bicker amongst ourselves about it. Now hit the link below and read Bruce Perens rebuttal to Linus' opinions on the KDE/Gnome debate. Update I had to close the comments. Not because they were bad, but because we had 95% of the httpd processes on this machine serving up that story. 200+ comments in 6 hours was just too much. Anyone wanna swap a boatload a RAM for advertising? If we can get more RAM, this hopefully won't happen again.