Several days ago the new experimental version of Wine 6.8 was released which comes with a series of updates and bug fixes accumulated since the release of version 6.7 and in which 35 bug reports have been closed and 359 changes have been made.
Among the most prominent changes we can find the improvements for some titles, such as Stone Giant, Age of Empires II, Fifa 11 and Diablo 1.
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.
What's new in the development version of Wine 6.8?
Among the most prominent changes of this new version for the Wine development branch, we can find that the installation of libraries in specific subdirectories for different hardware architectures was provided.
In addition, the build system has also been updated to install PE files, dummy DLLs, and related bits in architecture-specific directories. Similar to the architecture-specific subdirectories common to many Linux distributions for managing libraries, this can also help some workflows primarily for Wine developers.
In Wine 6.8 about 18 commits were implemented for the wined3d DirectX to OpenGL translation layer, as well as support for the map object in JavaScript applications.
Also in this new development version of Wine 6.8 it is highlighted that a fix for GroupMail 5.x is included that crashed at the beginning.
Regarding closed bug reports related to games, the following are mentioned: Crysis Wars Dedicated Server, Stone Giant, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, Sims Complete Collection, Age of Empires II (SafeDisc 1.x), FIFA 11 , Sacred Gold, Diablo 1, Swtor, Royal Quest, Star Citizen.
And of the closed bug reports related to applications mention to: Proteus 8, Explorer ++, Double Commander, Qvodplayer 3.5, Visual C ++ 2005 Express SP1, LibreOffice 5.1.0, CUEcards 2000 2.37, Samsung Dex, Powershell, Solid Edge Edition Academic 2021.
Finally if you want to know more about this new development version Wine released, you can check the change log In the following link.
How to install the development version of Wine 6.8 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 even if our system is 64 bits, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur.
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 on 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