14 DAY TRIAL // Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.46 has been released, and it comes with improvements for various new features and support for numerous applications and games.
The developers say that Wine is more like a compatibility layer than an emulator, and they compare it with compatibility settings that can be found in newer Windows OSes. In any case, it's the main method of running Windows apps and games in Linux, so it stands to reason that it gets update a lot. It's also worth noting that there is a performance penalty for running apps in this way, but the more powerful the system, the less noticeable it becomes.
The Wine devs have a couple of branches maintained, one stable and one not. As some of you might have noticed already, the stable version of Wine hasn't been updated in more than a year, which make the development version the most used one. It's not really a problem and users are not reporting the fact that it's unstable.
Wine 1.7.46 is not all that impressive
According to the changelog, the BITS file transfer service has received some improvements, the DirectWrite implementation has been refined, support has been added for shared user data on 64-bit, various C++ runtime improvements have been implemented, and more support has been added for the 64-bit ARM platform.
The list of supported games and apps for this version has: MYOB V13, BlogJet, Google Sketchup's 3D Warehouse, Lotus Organizer 97, Gox Box window, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Miranda IM, Neuro Hunter, BMFont, Oblivion, Shaiya Online, Points2Grid, Netgear Powerline 3.1, Starcraft Campaign Editor, Tomb Raider III, Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars, Steam client, msvcrt.dll, and more.
How to install Wine in Ubuntu
Users can get Wine 1.7.46 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (with root access):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine