Wine is a reimplementation of the Win16 and Win32 application programming interface for Unix-based operating systems.
The release of the new development version of Wine 8.6 was announced, in which since the release of version 8.5, 25 bug reports have been closed and 414 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 which 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 uses some Windows libraries, in the form of .dll files.
Wine is one of the best ways to run Windows applications on Linux. In addition, the Wine community has a very detailed application database.
Main new features of the development version of Wine 8.6
In this new release that is presented, it is highlighted that the browser engine Mozilla Gecko has been updated to version 2.47.4, as well as the controller PostScript has improved support for spool files that store data about a print job.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version of Wine 8.6 is that now It has a built-in math library borrowed from the musl libc 1.2.3 project.
On the part of the known bug fixes in Wine 8.6, of the fixed game problems are mentioned: The Westerner, Team Fortress Arcade, Pixel Force: Left 4 Dead, Inquisitor, My Place, DiRT Rally 2.0, Matrix Awakens MegaCity Unreal Engine 5.1 demo, Hogwarts Legacy, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008.
It also highlights the fixed issues in the Chromium sandbox and other random app issues now being resolved, plus added windows.ui.composition.idl file with Windows.UI.Composition.* definitions.
Of the other changes made:
- schtasks.exe: schtasks fails on Windows 7 when privileges are missing
- No elevated privileges schedsvc:rpcapi fails on Windows 7
- Multiple apps crash on unimplemented function
- askchd:scheduler – test_GetTask() fails on Windows 7 when you do not have sufficient privileges
- schedsvc:rpcapi causes taskchd:scheduler to hang on w7u_adm
- dinput:device8 – test_dik_codes() sometimes gets timeouts in GitLab CI
- schtasks.exe:schtasks causes taskchd:scheduler to crash on w7u_adm and w8adm
- Compilation fails with gcc 4.8.4 - error: missing binary operator before token "("
- dinput:device8 - test_mouse_keyboard() fails on some Windows 7 locales LDAP Explorer (LEX) doesn't connect without SSL
- dinput:device8 – test_overlapped_format() sometimes gets a timeout in Wine (GitLab CI)
- Wine cannot update existing prefix
- DnsQuery_A() mishandles DNS CNAME records
If you want to know more about this new development version of Wine released, you can check the registry of changes in the following link.
How to install the development version of Wine 8.6 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 and most important step will be to enable the 32-bit architecture, that although our system is 64-bit, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur, since most of the Wine libraries are focused on 32-bit architecture.
For this we write about 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 "deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" 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 in the system by executing the following command:
wine --version
How to uninstall Wine from Ubuntu or some derivative?
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