14 DAY TRIAL // A new development version of Wine, 1.7.27, has been announced by Alexandre Julliard and is now available for download and testing. It features a few interesting major improvements and a host of smaller changes.
This particular branch of Wine is considered to be a development one, but it's also the one that's used the most. This version comes with all the most advanced fixes and improvements that are necessary to run the latest games and Windows applications. The regular branch is more stable, but it doesn't provide the same level of compatibility. In fact, it's long overdue a launch for the stable version, but it looks like we'll have to wait at least another week.
Wine is one of the most used applications on Linux and it's included in numerous distributions by default. If not, it's at least present in the repositories. Wine updates are always anticipated, because they can bring some important changes. The latest version is especially useful to run some of the latest Windows-only games.
What's new in the latest Wine release
The new Wine versions have two separate changelogs. As usual, the more important changelog features some of the biggest improvements and new features, and the secondary one lists all the smaller fixes that were implemented since the previous release. For example, the Direct2D support has been improved, various changes have been made to the RichEdit interfaces, and initial support for ICMP version 6 has been implemented.
Here is a list of applications and games that should now work better: Thunder, Starcraft 2, AT4RE FastScanner, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Visual Studio 2005, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, BetterInstaller, Sentinel, Magic & Mayhem 2: The Art of Magic, XMP, Iexplore, WiX Toolset 3.8, and msvcmaker.
Where to get the new Wine
Wine (which stands for Wine is not an emulator) can be usually found in every major repository, but only the stable version. You can easily install the development build of Wine with the help of a PPA, at least in Ubuntu, but it might be present in other repos as well. All you need to do is to open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root in order for it to work).
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine
Please keep in mind that this is a development release and it's bound to have bugs and other issues. Do not use it on production machines.