Wine 8.9 arrives with about 284 changes

a few days ago announced the release of the new version experimental implementation Wine 8.9, in which since the release of version 8.8, 16 bug reports have been closed and 284 changes have been made, of which many of them were focused on general and performance improvements.

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.

Main new features of the development version of Wine 8.9

The new version that is presented of Wine 8.9 stands out that it arrives with additional support for Wayland and it is that of the changes made, It should be noted that it includes:

• winewayland.drv: Allows you to assign process_wayland statically.
• winewayland.drv: to read and send Wayland events.
• winewayland.drv: For handling dynamic Wayland output events.
• winewayland.drv – Makes access to Wayland output information thread-safe.
• winewayland.drv – Updates display devices from the desktop window thread.
• winewayland.drv – Updates the size of the desktop window on display changes.

Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is that the Wine Monkey engine with the implementation of the .NET platform has been updated to version 8.0.0.

In addition to this, it is also noted that in a new version, PostScript driver translation to PE executable file format completed (Portable Executable) and support for the Doppler effect has been added to the DirectSound API, as well as improved GdiPlus performance.

On the other hand, it is mentioned that work continued to close bug reports related to games and in this release the games that received fixes were Need For Speed ​​​​Underground and Battle.net.

While the application-related fixes part mentions Silverlight 5.x requiring “Audio Capture Filter” to record from the microphone, .netCore failing to bind to the port shortly after another . netCore bound to the same port, Notepad using Japanese input method (IM), cursor sometimes backtracks when converting string, and Framemaker 8 failed to print

Finally, 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 8.9 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?

Finally for those who want to uninstall this development version of 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