Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is an alternative implementation of
the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs. Wine provides both a development
toolkit (Winelib) for porting legacy Windows sources to Unix and a
program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to
run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Unixes including
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, and (to a certain extent) SCO
OpenServer, SCO Unixware and OS/2. Wine does not require Microsoft
Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation
consisting of 100% Microsoft Free code, but it can optionally use
native system DLLs if they are available. Wine comes with complete
sources, documentation and examples and is freely
redistributable.
This development release contains an ELF DLL loader, some more
DOS support, still more common controls and SHELL32 features, using
Windows native USER.DLL may work, and lots of bug fixes.