After a few weeks of development by the people who are in charge of the Wine project The availability of an experimental version Wine 4.6 has been announced. Since the release of version 4.5, 50 bug reports closed and 384 changes made.
Wine is a layer of the open source implementation of the Win32 API capable of running a Windows compatibility layer on Linux, MacOS, and BSD.
Wine is uAn excellent completely free alternative to the Windows API for GNU / Linux systems and you can also optionally use native Windows DLLs, if available.
Please note that while some applications and games work fine with Wine on a Linux distribution, others may have bugs.
Unless a specific Windows program is essential for you, in general it is advisable to try to find an alternative to the desired program in Linux first or choose a cloud solution.
Furthermore, Wine offers a development kit as well as a Windows program loader, so developers can easily modify many Windows programs that run under x86 Unix, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Wine has two versions which is the stable version and the development version. The stable version is the result of work and bug fixes in the development version.
The development version is usually the most important in theory because this version is released in order to detect all those errors and be able to correct them or apply patches.
About the new development version of Wine 4.6
In this development release of Wine in addition to the fixes, also se stand out from closed bug reports related to game and app work, among which we can highlight are:
The Spirit Engine, Monkey Island 3, SIV (System Information Viewer) v4.00, Still Life 2, Shiva Editor, Pride of Nations, Theater of War 3: Korea, Warframe, Face Noir, Last Half of Darkness, Ultimate Unwrap Pro v 3.50.14, Mass Effect.
It is also highlighted that added initial backend implementation for WineD3D Based on the Vulkan graphics API.
As well as the ability to download Mono libraries from general directories. Libwine.dll is no longer required when using the Wine DLL on Windows.
Of the other changes that We can find in this development version of Wine 4.6:
- Regression tests are compiled into executable PE format.
- Support for complex structures has been added to typelib.
- The video capture system is localized to use the second version of Video4Linux.
- The initial version of the debugging engine (debugging engine DLL) was introduced.
How to install the development version of Wine 4.6 on Linux?
If you are interested in being able to try this new development version of Wine on your distro, You can do it by following the instructions we share below.
To install this version of Wine 4.6 on Ubuntu and derivatives we are going to do the following, in a terminal we type:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Now we are going to add the following to the system:
wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key 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
While for those who are users of Debian and systems based on it, should do the following.
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/stretch main sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel
For In the case of Fedora and its derivatives, we must add the appropriate repository to the version we are using.
Fedora 29:
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/29/winehq.repo sudo dnf install winehq-devel
In the case of Arch Linux, Manjaro, Antergos or any distribution based on Arch Linux We can install this new version from its official distribution repositories.
sudo pacman -Sy wine
Si are openSUSE users You can install Wine from the official repositories of the distribution.
We will only have to wait for the packages to be updated, this will be in a matter of days.
The command to install Wine is as follows:
sudo zypper install wine