Google Sponsors Improvements for Wine

Last week, Dan Kegel, a software engineer at Google, posted a message to the Wine mailing list where he described a few of the improvements to Wine that Google sponsored.

Kegel said that Google hired Codeweavers to make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine, because Photoshop is one of the applications that Linux users are constantly clamoring for. Besides Photoshop, he said that Flash 8 is working much better in Wine, too.

Photoshop is considered to be one of the best professional raster graphic editing solutions, and because it was not supported on the Linux operating system, not too many artists adopted this platform. Although there are some alternatives on Linux, like GIMP, the graphic artists consider them inadequate because they lack important features, like native CMYK support.

If you thought that Google made a completely different version of Picasa for Linux, then you're wrong! The developers used the Windows build and bundled it with a lighter version of Wine. The application keeps improving, as developers will work on the betterment of Wine for Picasa 2.7.

Dan Kegel, Lei Zhang and Alex Balut have been fixing random Wine bugs in their spare time. Kegel also did Valgrind runs over the Wine test suite. Google sponsored some work by Codeweavers to improve support for Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech recognition product. Now, users with disabilities who have to use this type of software will have the ability to run Dragon Naturally Speaking through Wine.

Google will continue to sponsor Wine's development, thus allowing more users to migrate to Linux distributions. In a response to Dan Kegel's message, Wine developer Jeremy White said: "I just want to take a moment to personally and publicly thank Dan and Google"; "We have appreciated Google's support, and the work of all Google employees, interns, and SOC students very much; it has been a great boon to Wine."



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