14 DAY TRIAL // A new development version of Wine, 1.7.21, has been announced and its makers have implemented a number of changes and fixes.
The development build of Wine seems to have resumed its regular scheduled and a new version has been released only a week after the previous one.
According to the changelog, support has been added for critical sections in the C runtime, the Unicode data has been updated to Unicode 7.0, support has been implemented for interlaced PNG encoding, an initial stub for the Packager library has been added, and numerous 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 1.7.21 also brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Virtual Moon Atlas, Unity Web Player, Runes of Magic, Word Pro, Steam, Smilebox, Dragon Age Awakening, Mass Effect 2, Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0, Deadlock, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Starcraft Campaign Editor, Avast Free Antivirus, Wolfenstein - The New Order, Tomb Raider Chronicles, Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool, PlayOn 3.9.13, Tucows Download Manager 2014, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, AcdSee 7.0, and many others.
According to the changelog, the Unity Web Player 2.1.0 now shows graphics in the browser, the program "Antik Virtual set-top-box" no longer crashes at startup, the Steam client major lag has been corrected, the Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0 no longer lacks shadows and smoke in testing mode, the Office 365 (Office 2013) web installer no longer exists early, the Runes of Magic 5.0.0.2535 (full client) no longer crashes during update, Adobe Creative Cloud no longer needs KERNEL32.dll, and Wolfenstein - The New Order no longer fails to start.
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.