winemenubuilder: Add an option for thumbnailing .lnk files.

[wine.git] / ANNOUNCE

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is
now available.

This release represents two years of development effort and over
23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit
applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.

It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, and over
3,000 bug fixes. See the release notes below for a summary of the
major changes.

The source is available from the following locations:

  http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.2.tar.bz2
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.2.tar.bz2

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

  http://www.winehq.org/download

You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation

You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details.

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

----------------------------------------------------------------

What's new in Wine 1.2
======================

*** Core functionality

- Loading and running 64-bit Windows applications is now supported on
  x86-64 processors (only on Linux at this point).

- There are now two flavors of Wine prefixes, 32-bit and
  64-bit. 32-bit prefixes only support 32-bit applications, while
  64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The
  prefix flavor is set at prefix creation time and cannot be changed
  afterwards, since all the files and registry entries are in
  different locations. Backwards compatibility is ensured by
  considering all prefixes created with older Wine versions to be
  32-bit.

- WoW64 file system redirection is supported now. When running a
  32-bit application in a 64-bit prefix, accesses to the
  window/system32 directory are automatically redirected to
  windows/syswow64.

- WoW64 registry redirection is now supported in 64-bit prefixes. This
  allows both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to set platform-specific
  registry keys without stepping on each other.

- All the 16-bit support code has been moved to a set of independent
  16-bit modules. No 16-bit code is loaded or initialized when running
  a standard Win32 application, unless it starts making 16-bit calls.

- The mount manager now reports the actual UUID for disk devices that
  support it instead of a hard-coded one.

- Symbolic links are now supported in the registry.

- The C runtime libraries msvcr80, msvcr90 and msvcr100 used by recent
  Visual C++ versions are now partially implemented.

- Some functions now use a Microsoft-compatible function prologue when
  building with a recent enough gcc. This allows Steam overlays to
  work.


*** User interface

- There are new icons for all the built-in applications, as well as
  for the standard toolbars and images. The icons are based on the
  Tango set for a nicer integration with the native Unix desktop look.

- Animated cursors can now be loaded, though only the first frame of
  the animation is used as a static cursor.

- The mouse cursor is now updated correctly in applications that
  create windows from different threads, like Internet Explorer.

- The standard print and page setup dialogs are working much better
  now.

- There is now an application wizard control panel to manage installed
  applications.

- Rendering of bi-directional text is now supported reasonably
  well. There is also some support for Arabic text shaping.

- Many features of the RichEdit control are improved, particularly
  support for tables, URL detection, cursor positioning, scrollbar
  management, and support for windowless controls.

- Many common controls work better now, particularly the listview,
  calendar and tab controls.

- There is now a partial implementation of the Microsoft Text Services
  framework, which provides better input method support in modern
  applications.

- There is now a proper user interface for importing, exporting and
  managing cryptographic keys and certificates.

- Wine is now fully translated to French, German, Dutch, Italian,
  Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean. It
  has partial translations for another twenty languages.


*** Desktop integration

- The XDG standard for application startup notification is now
  implemented.

- The NET_WORKAREA property is now supported to let applications take
  into account the size of the Unix desktop task bars.

- File associations created by a Windows applications are now
  registered with the Unix desktop.

- Application icons are now set with the NET_WM_ICON hint, which
  enables alpha channel transparency under window managers that
  support it.

- Maximizing a window from the Unix window manager is now detected and
  the state is correctly reflected on the Windows application side.

- The XDG desktop screen saver is now launched when a Windows
  application makes a request to start the screen saver.

- Start Menu entries are now properly removed when an application is
  uninstalled.

- Copying and pasting images between Windows and Unix applications
  works more reliably now, and more image formats are supported.

- Launching an external Unix Web browser from a Windows application
  now works correctly.

- MSI files are now associated with Wine to enable launching them
  directly from the desktop.

- The virtual desktop window now switches to full-screen mode when its
  size matches that of the screen.

- The strange window management behavior used by Delphi-generated
  applications is better supported now.


*** Graphics

- Subpixel font rendering is now supported, which greatly improves
  text appearance on LCD screens. The subpixel configuration is
  derived from the system fontconfig and Xft settings.

- Icons with alpha channels are now properly blended in, for a much
  nicer appearance.

- Image lists now properly store the alpha channel of images and use
  it when displaying them.

- The windowscodecs dll has been added, with codecs for the JPEG, GIF,
  PNG, BMP, ICO, and TIFF image formats.

- Many functions are now implemented in GDIPlus. The gdiplus dll is
  now considered good enough to load the built-in version by default.

- Overlays are now supported in DirectDraw.

- Many more capabilities are now supported in the SANE scanner
  backend. This improves scanning support in Acrobat.


*** Audio

- The openal32 dll is now implemented, as a wrapper around the Unix
  OpenAL library.

- There is now an initial implementation of the mmdevapi dll (part of
  the new Vista sound architecture), using OpenAL for sound I/O.

- The msgsm32.acm GSM codec is now supported.

- The ALSA sound driver now works better with PulseAudio's ALSA
  emulation.

- Digital playback of audio CDs is now supported.


*** Internet and networking

- The HTTP protocol implementation has seen many improvements, in
  particular better handling of proxies and redirects, better cookie
  management, support for gzip encoding, fixes for chunked transfer
  mode, support for IPv6 addresses, and better certificate validation
  on secure connections.

- The Gecko HTML engine has been updated to a more recent upstream
  version. Many more HTML objects are now implemented.

- The RPC layer now properly supports server-side authentication and
  impersonation. The COM marshalling/unmarshalling is also more
  compatible. RPC is now supported over the HTTP protocol too.

- There is now an essentially complete implementation of the
  JavaScript language.

- The IRDA network protocol is now supported by the socket layer.

- The inetmib1 dll is now implemented, with support for the standard
  SNMP MIB tables.

- The inetcomm dll now implements the POP3 and SMTP protocols, as well
  as better MIME support.

- Extended mail providers are now better supported, particularly the
  native Outlook provider. Mail attachments are also supported now.

- Many undocumented functions in the shlwapi dll have been implemented
  for improved Internet Explorer support.


*** Direct3D

- FBOs are now used by default for off-screen rendering in Direct3D.

- Backbuffers larger/smaller than their associated window are now
  correctly stretched.

- A large portion of the d3dx9 dlls is now implemented, most notably
  the shader assembler, .x file support, functions for fonts, general
  3D math, mesh handling, and sprites. A start has been made with the
  texture and effect functions.

- Fog handling has improved a lot.

- Various YUV texture formats are now supported.

- wined3d contexts are now managed per-thread, and play nice both with
  other wined3d instances and opengl32 GL contexts. Contexts are
  checked for validity before being used (e.g. if the associated
  window is destroyed.)

- Point sprite handling has improved a lot.

- The shader source is now dumped on GLSL compile/link failures. This
  is mostly to help driver developers, like Mesa, with investigating
  GLSL bugs triggered by Wine.

- The graphics card detection code is improved, and many more graphics
  cards are now recognized.

- User clip planes are now supported in shaders. This allows proper
  water reflections in Half-Life 2.

- There is now an initial implementation of Direct3D 10, including the
  dxgi, d3d10core and d3d10 dlls.  Most of the work so far has gone
  into parsing d3d10 effects and SM4 shaders.

- Shadow samplers are now properly supported. This fixes shadows in
  StarCraft 2.

- There is now a shader based implementation of D3D fixed function
  fragment processing. This avoids some limitations of the previous
  OpenGL fixed function based approach.

- Partial updates of surfaces with compressed formats are now properly
  supported.

- Many new OpenGL extensions are now supported. These include:

   - EXT_provoking_vertex/ARB_provoking_vertex. This allows the
     correct vertex color to be used when flat shading is enabled, and
     helps Civilization IV in particular.

   - EXT_vertex_array_bgra/ARB_vertex_array_bgra. This allows for more
     efficient handling of BGRA (D3DCOLOR) data in the fixed function
     pipeline.

   - EXT_draw_buffers2. This enables independent color write masks
     when multiple (simultaneous) render targets are in use.

   - Various nVidia extensions to ARB vertex/fragment programs. These
     allow SM3 support with the ARB vertex/fragment program shader
     backend.

   - EXT_texture_compression_rgtc. This adds support for the ATI2N
     (also known as 3Dc) compressed texture format.

   - ARB_texture_rg. This allows for more efficient support of the
     R16F, G16R16F, R32F and G32R32F texture formats.

   - ARB_framebuffer_object. This is mostly the same as the existing
     support for EXT_framebuffer_object, but improves rendering with a
     depth/stencil buffer larger than the color buffer(s). It helps
     (among others) Splinter Cell,

   - ARB_sync. This adds support for multi-threaded / cross GL context
     event queries used by Dragon Age: Origins.

   - ARB_half_float_vertex. This adds support for 16-bit floating
     point vertex formats on cards that don't already support
     NV_half_float. It helps Supreme Commander.

- There is now a general framework for supporting variations/quirks in
  GL drivers.


*** Built-in applications

- The Wine debugger now displays a crash dialog to let the user know
  that a crash happened before dumping the backtrace information.

- The Wine debugger now uses the Dwarf exception unwinding data for
  more reliable backtraces.

- The file dialogs in built-in applications are now resizable.

- Regedit can now import from and export to files in Unicode format.

- Wineboot now displays a dialog while creating or updating the prefix
  directory to let the user know that something is happening, since
  the update can take some time, particularly with 64-bit prefixes.

- Text replacement is now implemented in Notepad.

- The print preview feature in Wordpad now works much better.

- Navigation in help files now works better in Winhelp. Many graphical
  glitches have also been fixed.

- The Winecfg dialogs have been tweaked so that the application is
  usable in a 640x480 desktop. The About panel has been redesigned
  with better graphics.

- The command-line parser in cmd.exe is more compatible now, which
  should enable more Windows batch files to execute correctly. There
  is also a regression test suite for it.

- Rpcss now implements a proper RPC endpoint mapper.


*** Build environment

- The Wine IDL compiler can now generate correct code for all the
  standard IDL files, including proper exception handling. A large
  number of COM proxies and servers are now automatically generated
  from their IDL definitions.

- The fake dll placeholders are now built at compile time, instead of
  being generated every time a Wine prefix is created. This makes it
  possible to install a placeholder for every supported dll, which
  should avoid many failures in installers that check dll versions.

- configure now supports the --disable-tests option to prevent
  building the test suite. This allows for faster compile times,
  particularly when bisecting a regression.

- The cross-compiled tests are now built against the Wine import
  libraries instead of the Mingw ones. The latter are not compatible
  enough for our needs.

- winegcc now handles resource files just like normal object files and
  links them into the final binary without requiring special build
  rules.

- winebuild and winegcc now fully support Solaris.

- Wine now builds properly on Cygwin, though some of the resulting
  binaries do not work correctly.

- Makefiles are now created as needed during the build process,
  instead of being all created together at configure time. This makes
  it unnecessary to run 'make depend' in most cases.

- winemaker now has better support for Visual C++ project files.


*** Miscellaneous

- The OLE storage implementation now supports transacted storage, with
  proper commits and rollbacks. This enables support for Microsoft
  Office documents containing macros.

- The MSI installer now supports patches, which enables the
  installation of service packs for many applications. Many more MSI
  standard actions are also supported now.

- The rsaenh dll now supports the SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
  encryption algorithms, as well as CALG_SSL3_SHAMD5 hashing.

- OLE database objects are now implemented, which fixes the clipart
  functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.

- Copying and pasting OLE objects across applications works better now.

- Support for cryptographic signatures and certificates is improved,
  including support for certificate trust lists.

- The Task Scheduler service is now implemented.


*** Performance

- Bitmap stretching and alpha blending is now done through Xrender
  when possible, which avoids a time-consuming round-trip of the
  bitmap bits from the X server.

- Startup time for MSI installers that contain a large amount of
  strings is much improved.

- Setting the processor affinity for threads or processes is now
  supported, which improves multi-core performance for applications
  that take advantage of it.

- Loading large symbol tables in the Wine debugger is much faster
  now.

- FBO handling has improved significantly. Recently used FBO
  configurations are now cached, which is a major performance
  improvement.

- Loading shader constants is more efficient now. This improves
  performance for (among others) Half-Life 2, Counter Strike: Source,
  and Source Engine games in general.

- The performance of sRGB samples is improved, this particularly helps
  Source Engine games.


*** Platform-specific changes

- Joysticks POV switch and axis remapping are now better supported on
  Linux. Joysticks are now supported on Mac OS X too.

- The various DVD I/O controls are now implemented on Mac OS X.

- The network routing and statistics functions in iphlpapi are now
  implemented on Solaris and FreeBSD.

- Mach-O debugging symbols (the format used by Mac OS X) are now
  supported in the debugger.

- Event ports are now used on Solaris for improved wineserver
  performance.


*** New library dependencies

- The libgnutls library is now used for encryption and certificate
  validation in secur32.

- The libgsm library is now used for the GSM codec support.

- The libmpg123 library is now used for mp3 decoding (except on Mac OS
  X where CoreAudio functions are used instead).

- The libopenal library is now used for the openal32 dll
  implementation, as well as for the mmdevapi dll (Vista sound
  support).

- The libtiff library is now used for TIFF image decoding in the
  windowscodecs dll.

- The libv4l1 library is now used for video capture in DirectShow.


*** Backwards compatibility

- The wineshelllink helper script has been removed. All the menu and
  desktop integration is now handled by winemenubuilder.

- The deprecated wineprefixcreate script has been removed. Wine prefix
  directories are created automatically as needed.

- Old LinuxThreads setups are no longer supported. Wine now requires
  the modern NPTL threading that has been standard on Linux for many
  years now.

- The PBuffer option for off-screen rendering has been removed from
  Direct3D. This code was unmaintained, and offered little advantage
  over the "fbo" or "backbuffer" modes.


*** Known issues with recent 1.2 changes

- The subpixel font rendering doesn't yet look quite as nice as that
  used by the rest of the Unix desktop.

- The OLE storage performance can degrade pretty badly on files with a
  particular layout.

- There is no 64-bit version of the Gecko engine yet, so 64-bit
  applications that use a browser control won't work correctly.

--
Alexandre Julliard
julliard@winehq.org