In the past week a new version was released for the Wine development branch, which is the new branch Wine 4.15 that in which since the release of version 4.14, 28 bug reports have been closed and 244 changes have been made.
For those who are still unaware of the Wine project you should know that this is a layer of the open source implementation of the Win32 API capable of running a Windows compatibility layer on Linux, MacOS, and BSD. Wine is an excellent completely free alternative to the Windows API for GNU / Linux systems and you can also optionally use native Windows DLLs, if available.
Please note that while some applications and games work fine with Wine on a Linux distribution, others may have bugs.
Unless a specific Windows program is essential for you, in general it is advisable to try to find an alternative to the desired program in Linux first or choose a cloud solution.
Furthermore, Wine offers a development kit as well as a Windows program loader, so developers can easily modify many Windows programs that run under x86 Unix, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Wine has two versions which is the stable version and the development version. The stable version is the result of work and bug fixes in the development version.
The development version is usually the most important in theory because this version is released in order to detect all those errors and be able to correct them or apply patches.
What's new in the Wine 4.15 development version
With the release of this new branch added initial implementation of HTTP service (WinHTTP) and its associated API for client and server applications that poison and receive requests using the HTTP protocol.
The supported calls are HttpReceiveHttpRequest(), HttpSendHttpResponse(), HttpRemoveUrl(), HttpCreateHttpHandle(), HttpCreateServerSession(), HttpCreateRequestQueue(), HttpAddrl, etc. An Http.sys handler has also been prepared that handles incoming HTTP requests.
While for nt64 architecture developers worked on support for stack unwinding has been added to ntdll and also added support for connecting external libunwind libraries.
From bug reports closed work related games and apps those of Dragon Age: Origins, Construct 2, World of Warcraft 7, Need For Speed Most Wanted 2012, Reflex Arena, Titanfall 2, Vypress Chat 2.1.9, Quickbooks 2018, EverQuest, Guild Wars, Wizard101, Touhou, Unreal Tournament, SwanSoft CNC.
Of the other changes that stand out in the announcement of this new development branch are:
- In Kernelbase a call to S is implementedetThreadStackGuarantee() , which is used in ntdll to handle stack overflow situations
- Arrival of improved support for multi-monitor setups when working on macOS
- Expanded interpreter capabilities jscript and vbscript
- En wine3d, added support for the extension WINED3D_TEXTURE_DOWNLOADABLE and the function was implemented wined3d_colour_srgb_from_linear()
- The functions d3drm_viewport2_GetCamera(), d3drm_viewport2_SetCamera(), d3drm_viewport2_GetPlane () and d3drm_viewport2_SetPlane () are implemented in d3drm
- The function gdipRecordMetafileStreamI () has been added to gdiplus
- Optimized set of controls for RichEdit edit forms
How to install the experimental version of Wine 4.15 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you are interested in being able to test this new development version of Wine on your distro, you can do so by following the instructions we share below.
The first step will be to enable the 32-bit architecture, that even if our system is 64 bits, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur, for this we write on the terminal:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Now we must import the keys and add them to the system with this command:
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key
Done this now we are going to add the following repository to the system, for this we write in the terminal:
sudo apt-add-repository https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get --download-only install winehq-devel sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade