The guys behind the development of the popular Wine project, recently announced the release of the new development version of Wine 5.4 This being an important number, because a little two months after the release of the stable branch 5.0 we are already on this development version since this could indicate that it would be jumping to the next branch 6.x (at the rate they are going) before to finish this first semester of the year.
For those who do not know about Wine, they should know that this is a popular free and open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. To be a bit more technical, Wine is a compatibility layer that translates system calls from Windows to Linux and it uses some Windows libraries, in the form of .dll files.
Wine it is one of the best ways to run Windows applications on Linux. In addition, the Wine community it has a very detailed application database, we find it as AppDB it contains more than 25,000 programs and games, classified by their compatibility with Wine.
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.
What's new in the development version of Wine 5.4?
This new development version of Wine 5.4 arrives with some changes and that since the release of version 5.3 34 bug reports closed and 373 changes made.
Of the most important changes that are presented in this new development branch of Wine 5.4, we can find the following:
- Updated firmware to use the new C UCRTBase runtime is highlighted.
- Improved support for domain names that contain national alphabet characters (IDN, internationalized domain names).
- Support for drawing rounded rectangles is added in Direct2D.
- In D3DX9 a method to render text (ID3DXFont :: DrawText) is implemented, due to the lack of text that is not displayed in some games.
- Unicode data conforms to the Unicode 13 specification.
Regarding closed bug reports related to the operation of games and applications, mention is made of the work carried out to improve the execution of: ABBYY FineReader Pro 7.0, Far Manager v3.0, The Bat !, Foxit Reader 3.0, Assassin's Creed, Tale of the Twister, Europa Universalis Rome, Delphi Twain, PSPad 4.5.7, BioShock 2, AION, AVG Free Edition 2012-2014, TuneUp Utilities 2014, Final Fantasy V, Keepass 2.36, NieR: Automata, Divinity Original Sin 2, SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition, Gaea 1.0.19, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, RPG Tkool, Fable: The Lost Chapters, Oddworld - Munch odissey, Discord, Asuka 120%, Dynacadd 98, Torchlight.
If you want to know more about the details of this launch, you can consult them in the following link
How to install the development version of Wine 5.4 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
Finally we can verify that we already have Wine installed and also what version we have on the system by executing the following command:
wine --version
How to uninstall Wine from Ubuntu?
As for those who want to uninstall Wine from their system for whatever reason, They should only execute the following commands.
Uninstall the development version:
sudo apt purge winehq-devel sudo apt-get remove wine-devel sudo apt-get autoremove