A new development version of Wine is out

Apr 3, 2015 15:50 GMT  ·  By

Wine developers have announced that a fresh version of the application has been released and is now available for download. This is still the development branch, but the developers have not slowed down, and they are still making important changes.

Some Wine releases are more interesting than others, but the 1.7.40 is among the top ones. It might not seem that way from the changelog that has been shared, and there aren't too many new apps and games supported, but some of the things mentioned by the devs should catch your eye.

"Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode," reads the official website.

The stable version is nowhere in sight

It's been more than a year since the previous stable release, but the developers are not showing any sign that they might settle down. It's also true that, even if this is the unstable branch of Wine, it also the most used one by the community.

According to the changelog, support has been implemented for kernel job objects, fixes have been added to the ListView control, OOB data in Windows Sockets is now much better supported, the support for MSI patches has been improved, and a number of fixes for ACL file permissions have been implemented.

Wine 1.7.40 features fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Trine, InqScribe, CDBurnerXP, World Series of Poker, SEGA Genesis, Microsoft Visio 2007-2010, Air Video Server HD, Total Commander 8.x, Montezuma's Revenge Remake, Unreal Tournament 3 Black Edition, Worms World Party, Myst Online Uru Live, and Playchess.

More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.40 source packages right now from Softpedia. It's possible to compile the package by yourself, but there are quite a few dependencies, and it will take a while.