It took fifteen years of development, but the open source application Wine finally released its first stable version Tuesday.

Wine 1.0 allows you to run Windows “.exe” programs on Linux or Mac OS operating systems. Unlike emulators like VMWare or Parallels that allow you to run Windows on other OS’, it is unnecessary to own a copy of the operating system to run apps through Wine. The application bypasses the OS and simulates the Windows system libraries instead.

Wine doesn’t support every Windows application — the list of supported programs are mostly video games. However, even if your favorite program isn’t included on the supported list, there’s still a chance Wine can handle it.

In fact, when I tried to get Windows Media Player running using Wine on Ubuntu, I got an error message saying the player couldn’t verify my copy of Windows was valid. Seems like it works just fine to me.

See Also:

• Wine Headed For a 1.0 Release. Finally

Everyone’s changing their version control system these days. Most seem to be moving from a centralized system, like CVS or Subversion, to one of the new-fangled distributed systems like Git and Mercurial.

FreeBSD, never the trend-setter, is leaving behind the crusty old CVS its source tree has been on for centuries, and upgrading — to Subversion, the whipping boy of 2008! When rats like Rails start migrating away from a sinking ship, leave it to good old FreeBSD to grab that tiller, so popular five years ago.

On Reddit, there’s a discussion, in which the sound reasons for the choice are outlined and attacked.

Image by Tortuga One, Flickr’s most tireless documentor of pharmacies.