NetBSD Is Seeing Better Wine Support Thanks To Google Summer of Code

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects on the BSD front this year is porting Wine to run on AMD64 (x86_64) under NetBSD.

NetBSD has been running Wine to some extent on i386 but this effort has been about getting a Wine 64-bit port running nicely with 32-bit Windows program compatibility.

NetBSD's last known good Wine state was Wine 1.9.18, which is ancient, but student developer Naveen Narayanan (mentored by Leonardo Taccari, Maya Rashish and Christos Zoulas) has been focusing on getting Wine 4.4 running nicely. While AMD64 is his focus, in bringing that up he's been working on some i386 fixes to get that in good standing for Wine 4, including an important fix now going upstream.

"I think Wine-4.4 is in pretty good shape as of right now, but packaging it is tricky especially since chroot isn't an option, as it is privileged. I have been writing compat32 packages for dependencies of Wine to have them crosscompiled on amd64. I shall be working on getting Wine crosscompiled for 32 bit support on amd64 during the next coding period." Learn more in his initial report on his GSoC project.