After more than a year of development, Wine 2.0 has been released with over 6600 changes, which include support for Microsoft Office 2013, GStreamer 1.0 support, various Direct3D 10 and 11 improvements and more.
Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) allows running Microsoft Windows application on Unix-like operating systems. It is written primarily using reverse engineering, to avoid copyright issues.
Wine 2.0 release highlights:
- support for Microsoft Office 2013;
- more Direct3D 10 and 11 were implemented, including several shader model 4 and 5 shader instructions, sRGB read/write support and more (but Direct 3D 11 is still not fully supported);
- GStreamer version 1.0 is supported for audio and video streams;
- 64-bit support on macOS;
- the macOS graphics driver supports a high-resolution (“Retina”) rendering mode;
- window, bitmap and GDI DC render targets are implemented in Direct2D;
- in desktop mode, the taskbar displays running applications and allows switching between them;
- the clipboard support is reimplemented for better compatibility; copy & paste of HTML text is also improved. Drag & drop works more smoothly;
- font embedding in PDF files is supported;
- much more.
You can check out the complete release notes HERE.
Install Wine in Ubuntu or Linux Mint
Ubuntu / Linux Mint users can install the latest Wine by using its official PPA. To add the PPA and install Wine 2.0, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
sudo apt update
sudo apt install winehq-develIf you don’t want Wine 2.0 to overwrite your current Wine installation, install the “wine-devel” package instead of “winehq-devel”. You’ll then have to run it manually because there won’t be any /usr/bin/wine and so on (it’s installed in /opt/wine-devel/ and its executables in /opt/wine-devel/bin/). Using the “winehq-devel package, Wine will work just like the Ubuntu repository Wine builds.
The PPA also provides Wine Staging builds, which offer some extra features. We covered Wine Staging a while back, so check it out HERE.
For other Linux distributions or Mac OS, see the Wine downloads page.
Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.
