Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.55 is now out, and it comes with quite a few major fixes that are sure to draw some serious attention.

The improvements made to Wine are not usually all that transparent for the regular users, and the developers write their changelogs mostly for other devs or at least for people who are watching the project a lot closer.

Wine is an acronym for Wine is not an emulator and developers are saying that it's considered to be a compatibility layer, much, in the same way, you will find compatibility settings in modern Windows systems for older ones.

Wine 1.7.55 is really interesting

There are two different changelogs for each Wine release, one that deal with the application itself and the other one that reveals what changes and improvements have been made to support various apps and games.

According to the changelog, the Pulse audio driver has been added, various fixes for Microsoft Office 2013 support have been added, more work has been done for the Web Services DLL, more fixes for the latest C runtime version have been implemented, the Makefile generation has been improvement, and other bug fixes have been implemented.

The list of supported games and apps has expanded with the following titles: Adobe Premiere 6, Adobe AIR / Adobe Media Player, Resolume Avenue 3.3.2, Cubis Gold 2, ArcSoft PhotoStudio, PowerDVD 10, Freelancer, Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek Birth of the Federation, Guild Wars 2, Risen 2, Tomb Raider 2013, Sacred 2 Gold, valgrind, CCleaner, Emerge Desktop 6.1.3, Microsoft Office 2007, and numerous others.

How to install the latest version of Wine in Ubuntu

Users can get Wine 1.7.55 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (root access is required):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine