Wine is a compatibility layer for running windows applications on linux. applications are run at full speed without the need of cpu emulation. wine does not require microsoft windows, however it can use native system dll files in place of its own if they are available.
this package includes a program loader for running unmodified windows executables as well as the wine project's free version of the windows api for running programs ported from windows.
this package is based on a recent wine beta. while many more applications will work, there may be some loss of functionality compared with the stable release provided by the regular wine package.