Wine 7.21 arrives with improvements for PE, Vulkan and more

The launch of the new experimental version of Wine 7.21. Since the release of version 7.20, 25 bug reports have been closed and 354 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 7.21

In the new version of Wine 7.21 the OpenGL library changed to use PE executable file format (Portable Executable) instead of ELF, plus support for multi-arch builds in PE format was added.

Another change that stands out in this new version is that preparations have been made to support running 32-bit programs They use the Vulkan graphics API in a 64-bit environment. In addition, the ability to import libraries without using the dlltool utility has been provided.

There are 25 known bug fixes with Wine 7.21 that help software like fotoBiz X, Visual Studio, Kaseya Live Connect 9.5.0.28, DipTrace, foobar2000, Cherry MIDI sequencer, Winfile, Adobe Reader XI, along with various games like StarBurn 13, Euphoria, Darksiders Genesis, The Medium, Hotel Giant 2, Port Royale 2, Gothic 1.

Of the other changes that stand out:

• Fixed trace formats for 64-bit values ​​on ARM64.
• 64-bit module dependencies were loaded only from the 64-bit system directory.
• Reimplemented KeUserModeCallback on i386.
• Removed support for "hybrid" Unix libraries.
• Enter a new winebuild flag --sin-dlltool.
• The generation of import lib without dlltool was implemented.
• Unwind tables are enabled by default on PE files.
• Implemented delay import lib generation without dlltool.
• Fixed import hint value for symbols imported by name.
• Placed the delay import descriptor in the data section.
• One pthread key is now used for TEB on all platforms.
• nls: Update locale data to CLDR version 42.
• kernelbase: update time zone data to version 2022f.
• win32u: Always use the full join for sysparams entries.
• ntdll: Do not put NtCurrentTeb() inline in Unix libraries.
• openal32: Remove dll.
• Revert "light.msstyles: Add non-client metrics".
• ntdll: Add a Wine-specific process information class for the LDT copy.

Finally it is important to mention that candidate release and feature freeze period starts next month for Wine 8.0, while Wine 7.21 is one of the few remaining bi-weekly feature releases.

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 7.21 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