14 DAY TRIAL // Alexandre Julliard announced a new development version of Wine, 1.7.19, bringing a number of important new features, including some initial support for Direct2D.
The development build of Wine is progressing very fast, and numerous new features and fixes are added on an almost weekly basis. Each new version of Wine provides support for new applications and games, making this a very powerful tool to have, if you need to run Windows software in a Linux environment.
According to the changelog, a new JSProxy DLL for automatic proxy configuration has been added, the OLE Accessible Object support has been enhanced, more improvements have been added to the XML writer, fixes have been implemented for various memory issues found by Valgrind, the initial headers for Direct2D support have been put in place, and other various bug fixes have been implemented.
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 1.7.19 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Winamp, Counter-Strike: Source, Dramatica, Gears of War, C&C Red Alert 3, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Wolfenstein (2009), Left 4 Dead 2, Lord of the Rings, Supreme Commander 2, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II, Fussball Manager 11, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, From Dust, Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, BioShock 2, Batman: Arkham City, ManiaPlanet, A Vampyre Story, Airport Tycoon 2, Dungeons & Dragons Online, eRacer, and Lotus Notes.
According to the changelog, a problem that was causing multiple apps to refuse to install while complaining about registry security has been fixed, the battery visualization is now working in WMP9, the Winamp Equalizer and playlist are no longer always on top, Counter-Strike: Source (Steam) no longer crashes when joining game, Gears of War no longer fails on startup, ICQ 6.x no longer fails to load, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II now starts without any issues, and uTorrent 3.x no longer hangs.
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 1.7.19 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.