Recently the developers who are in charge of the Wine project, announced the news of the release of the development version of Wine 5.2, being that a pilot version that integrates some compatibility improvements and resource improvements implementation and that since the 5.1 release, 22 bug reports have been closed and 419 changes have been made.
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.
Main new features of the development version of Wine 5.2
In this new development version of Wine 5.2 the developers highlight work done on improved compatibility with Windows character mapping tables. As well as with the files invoked with encodings of the Microsoft Open Specification suite and that also eliminated the encodings that are missing in Windows.
The wrc resource compiler and the resource management utility wmc have improved support for UTF-8 and they have added the ability to use external NLS files
From bug reports closed related to work for the improvement of compatibility of games and applications, work is mentioned for: OllyDbg 2.x, Lotus Approach, PDF-XChange Viewer 2.5.213, Star Wars, SumatraPDF 3.1.2, PDF X-Change Viewer, Spintires: MudRunner, Lineage 2, The Sims 2, Armed Assault, Arturia MIDI Control Center, Verbum 8, SmartGuard 3.0, Affinity Photo, Cadence Allegro Professional 16.6.
Of the other changes that stand out the announcement of this new version:
- Fix in Firefox 72.0 as it hangs on every tab (unless dwrite is disabled).
- Multiple applications display transparent bitmap images on static controls with a black background (comctl32 lacks support for painting 3-bit BMPv32 with alpha channel).
- Worked to fix multiple Steam games failing to install DirectX runtime prerequisite resulting in repeated install attempt at startup ('xinput1_3.dll' crashed by client).
- NLS files were generated to encode tables and the ability to use external tables for Unix encodings was added.
- Implemented the ability to use the null display driver like a normal graphics driver.
- Fixed issues with using ucrtbase as C runtime.
Finally if you want to know more about the launch, you can check the release note in the following link
How to install the development version of Wine 5.2 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?
If you want to uninstall Wine from your system for whatever reason, You just have to execute the following commands.
Uninstall the development version:
sudo apt purge winehq-devel sudo apt-get remove wine-devel sudo apt-get autoremove