14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh development version of Wine, 1.7.20, has been announced and it comes with a number of features and improvements, not to mention support for new applications and games.
The development build of Wine had a small break and no new versions have been released in the past month. Not to worry, the devs have made up for it with some new features and a ton of other smaller modifications for games and other software.
According to the changelog, various X11 drag and drop fixes have been implemented, quite a few C/C++ runtime functions have been added, fixes have been implemented for various memory issues, some OLE storage fixes have been added, and more.
Every Wine version usually features lots of smaller fixes for various applications and games. They might not be as exciting as the major features, but some users might find that their favorite software is finally working.
Wine 1.7.20 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Neural Noise Synthesizer, ZDaemon, RPG Maker XP, RegCleaner, Microsoft Office 2007, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Crysis Warhead, Mass Effect 2, Ski Resort Tycoon 2, rFactor 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Path Of Exile, Virtual DJ, Borderlands 2, League of Legends, Raiden Legacy, Prince of Persia, Games For Windows Live 2.0, AudibleManager, and DynDNS Updater.
According to the changelog, the Neural Noise Synthesizer no longer fails to launch, the ZDaemon no longer freezes when exiting the launcher, an assertion failure with RegCleaner has been fixed, RPG Maker XP no longer freezes, Microsoft Office 2007 can now be activated properly, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl can now be installed, Crysis Warhead now starts properly, Mass Effect 2 no longer crashes, Ski Resort Tycoon 2 no longer fails to start, a Path Of Exile sound glitch has been fixed, and the Borderlands 2 mouse focus no works properly.
Wine (which stands for wine is not an emulator) can be usually found in every major repository, but only the stable version. You can easily install the development build of Wine with the help of a PPA. All you need to do is to open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root in order for it to work).
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wine
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.20 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.