QtWine - Wine brought to the desktop

It's been a few weeks now that qtwine 0.3.1 is available at sourceforge.net. This is mainly a bugfix release which fixes some minor bugs that I had spoted a few months ago, but I didn't have the time to fix them and upload a new release.

In 0.3.1, I also added a feature that is really really needed on debian and debian-based distributions. This feature allows the user to specify the path to the wine binary from the options dialog, so that this awful wineloader script that debian uses can be passed around. Debian users, ensure that you set it to point to /usr/lib/wine/wine.bin otherwise you'll always see those (really awful) green windows around that both take time to load and block some qtwine features from working correctly.

With 0.3.1 I decided to drop the binary tarball and upload distribution-specific packages. I was trying to make qtwine compile with the LSB SDK but it always failed for an unknown reason, so I decided to stop these efforts and start making distribution-specific packages. As a debian user myself, I have made a debian package for now. Future releases will probably have some rpm packages too.

Work on 0.4 has started and I already have made some big changes to include some great new features and fix some memory management problems that exist in 0.3 and previous releases. Some of the new features include a new gui, dbus support, managing “shortcuts” for windows applications, managing wine installations (i.e. have wine installed in both /usr and /usr/local and use the two versions interchangeably) and of course all those listed in the TODO page. I will soon start using the sourceforge cvs service to keep the code inside and by the release of 0.4 I expect to have some documentation available, both for developers and users. Expect 0.4 to be released during the summer.