14 DAY TRIAL // A new development version of Wine, 1.7.23, has been announced by Alexandre Julliard and it comes with at least one major new feature, namely Android support.
The development build of Wine has brought some big improvements and a new feature, which should be very interesting for most users out there.
According to the changelog, better support for drag and drop has been implemented, the HTTP cookie management has been improved, a number of fixes have been implemented to crypto certificates management, and initial support has been added for 64-bit Android builds.
Every Wine version usually features lots of smaller fixes for various applications and games. They might not be as glorious as the main ones, buy they are usually the bulk of the release and many users will find lots of fixes for their favorite apps and games.
Wine 1.7.23 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Adobe InDesign CS4, Icy Tower 1.4, Stem Cell engine, Dark Age of Camelot, Notepad++, Win7 File Open dialog, Alien Shooter, Desura, uPlay, Reason 7.0.1, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Drakensang: The Dark Eye, Crysis, REAPER 4.x, SolidEdge ST6, Runes of Magic, Windows Live Writer 14.0.x, Gex 3D, Rift (Steam), Molot VST, and Daemon Tools Ultra 1.x/2.x.
According to the changelog, Adobe InDesign CS4 (version 6) no longer crashes on launch, the keyboard buttons are now working in Operation Flashpoint and Fallout, Icy Tower 1.4 no longer crashes when moving its window, the Dark Age of Camelot patcher no longer crashes from the page fault, Notepad++ no longer receives drag and drop files in KDE, the Win7 File Open dialog fails to fill in the OPENFILENAME structure, and Wine is now able to open applications and scram the icons on Xfce desktops.
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 apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine
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.