14 DAY TRIAL // On March 7, Alexandre Julliard announced a new development version of the Wine app, which features a number of smaller improvements, but important nonetheless.
The number of new additions and bug fixes in the development version of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is quite large, and the current build is no different. Even if there are no huge changes since the previous release, it’s still an important update.
Wine may have lost a little from its users in the past year, after the rise of Steam for Linux and after a large number of games received native ports, but there are still a lot Windows applications that users need to run under Linux OSes.
The most important new features in Wine 1.7.14 are: improved Task Scheduler support, better AVI encoding, VisualBasic interfaces in MSXML, deflate content encoding in Winine support, and a number of fixes for monochrome printers.
Wine 1.7.14 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Rayman 3 Hoodlum Havoc, Need for Speed Porsche 2000, VMXBuider, Europa Universalis Rome, Rise of Legends, Starcraft II, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, Daemon Tools 3.47, MS Excel 2007, MS Office 2000, iTunes 10.2.2, Radeon Bios Editor, IMGBurn 2.5.7.0, WinRAR 5.0, Gallium 0.4, and iMesh 7.x.
According to the changelog, VMXBuider 0.8 (VB6 app) no longer fails to create new virtual machines, the EDWinXP application no longer crashes after the splash screen, the Europa Universalis Rome game finally works and it no longer crashes at startup, and the DAEMON Tools installer works without any issues.
Wine (stands for wine is not an emulator), can be usually found in every major repository, but usually only the stable version. The development release is available for Ubuntu with a help of a PPA, which can be installed pretty easily. All you need to do is to run the following commands in a terminal (you will need root access):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wine
Because it’s a development version, some of the games and applications that were working before might cease to function. If that happens, be sure to remove the PPA and install the stable branch of Wine.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. Download Wine 1.7.14 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.