A new development release has been made available by the developers

Sep 8, 2014 09:18 GMT  ·  By

Alexandre Julliard has announced that a new development version of Wine, 1.7.26, is now available for download and testing, and it brings lots of fixes and improvements for various games and applications.

It's difficult to consider this branch of Wine as being in development, but the truth is that users might encounter problems with it. The previous stable Wine build was released a few months ago, but the Dev branch has received so many fixes and improvements that it's getting hard to keep track of everything that's been going on.

Because Wine is used by so many people, in all kinds of distributions, every new release is expected with open arms and installed immediately, even if it's not the most prudent thing to do. Sometime it's necessary, especially if you really want to play Hearthstone on Linux, for example.

What's new in the latest Wine release

The new Wine versions have two separate changelogs. The first one details some of the major improvements made to the application. For example, Wine 1.7.26 has more DirectWrite functions, a number of improvements to the common File Dialog, a number of C runtime improvements, and a lot of bug fixes.

The second part of the changelog is much more specific and talks about what applications are now working with Wine and what has been fixed. Most of the fixes were made after the developers were notified by the users.

Here is a list of applications and games that should now work better: Kudos, Spore, Call of Atlantis, Final Fantasy XIV, War Leaders, Ava Trader, Baldur's Gate II, Opera Next 15.0 for Windows, Terraria, Macromedia Fireworks 8, Adobe Creative Cloud, Git, Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six Lockdown, and many more.

Alright, alright, where can I get it?

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, at least in Ubuntu, but it might be present in other repos as well. 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).

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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 the Wine 1.7.26 source package right now from Softpedia, if you want to compile it yourself.

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.