Google's support for Wine in 2007 and 2008

Written by Tom Wickline

Thursday, 21 February 2008 04:00

Dan Kegel (Wine Release Manager) posted this message to the
Wine development list last week.

As you might know, I work for Google, and part of my
day job is to help improve Wine. Here's a little report
about what we've been up to.

Google uses Wine primarily as the basis for the Linux
port of our photo management software, Picasa.
In fact, the Linux version is exactly the Windows build
of Picasa, bundled with a lightly patched version of Wine.
Most of the work in that port was to improve Wine so it
could handle Picasa, and that work is still going on.
Codeweavers did the initial port, and Googlers
Lei Zhang, Nigel Liang, and Michael Moss are
improving Wine further for Picasa 2.7.

Beyond Picasa, a few of us (Lei Zhang, Alex Balut, and I)
have been fixing random Wine bugs in our 20% time.
I've also been doing regular Valgrind runs over the Wine
test suite, pestering developers who accidentally check
in code that Valgrind doesn't like. Hats off to the
Valgrind team for a great tool, and to the (non-Google)
folks who work on Valgrind/Wine compatibility (Eric Pouech,
Tom Hughes, and John Reiser, among others).

Google also sponsored some work by Codeweavers to improve
support for Photoshop ('cause so many people want it) and
for Dragon Naturally Speaking ('cause even Linux users get RSI).
While not yet perfect, those apps are a lot more usable now
as a result. In particular, Photoshop CS and CS2 are quite
usable indeed. (See http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobePhotoshop for
details.)

I also had the pleasure of hosting eight students as
Google interns working on Wine throughout the year.
Here are their names, and roughly what they worked on:
Dan Hipschman: widl
Evan Stade: gdiplus, Powerpoint Viewer
James Hawkins: msi
Jennifer Lai: win16 conformance tests
Juan Lang: crypt32, iTunes
Matt Jones: mono testing
Mikolaj Zalewski: Photoshop, Limux
Roy Shea: svchost, BITS

The original post can be found here.

As for 2008 Dan posted about the next big applications that should have focus.

Next big app(s) to try?

Now that Adobe Photoshop CS2 is running kind of

well (there are bugs that need fixing, but I'm trying
to look ahead a bit), what big app(s) are worth focusing on next?

Using http://wiki.winehq.org/LinuxApplicatonRequestSurvey,
skipping Photoshop (which we should continue to fix up)
and the ones that are either too hard, have native versions,
or are probably something Codeweavers might already be
doing, and adding in good old Framemaker (so close to working
we might want to go for it just for the goodwill from all
those tech writers), I think that leaves about seven big
ticket apps, in rough order of popularity:

The original post can be found here.

Looks like 2008 will be the year the majority of Adobe products start to run on Linux!