Wine 1.4 is Released

Posted on March 8, 2012

Wine software allows you to run Microsoft Windows applications on Linux/Unix operating systems. Recently many release candidate of wine 1.4 released in the past few weeks, and here comes the final stable release of Wine 1.4 after 20 Months of development. The latest stable release Wine 1.4 brings several improvements to graphics rendering, added a newDIB graphics engine, improved Direct3D, support for many new applications and over than 16,000 individual changes. Check What’s new in Wine 1.4 and installation instructions down below.

What’s New In Wine 1.4 Stable Release

Wine 1.4 comes with many changes and improvements since the earlier release 1.3 and here are the highlights of Wine 1.4 changes.

  • There is a new graphics engine for rendering into Device Independent Bitmaps (DIB). DIB rendering no longer requires access faults or round-trips to the X server, which yields large performance gains in DIB-intensive applications.
  • The DIB engine can also be used for fall-back implementations of some graphics primitives, like alpha blending, when the display driver doesn’t support them directly.
  • More image codecs are implemented, including support for TGA and CMYK, JPEG decoding, as well as BMP, TIFF, PNG, and ICNS encoding.
  • The Alsa, OSS, and CoreAudio drivers have been rewritten to use the new model. They now serve as back-ends to the MMDevAPI dll, which no longer needs to rely on the OpenAL library.
  • The Audio tab in the Wine Configuration tool has been redesigned for the new audio subsystem. The appropriate driver is automatically selected and no longer needs to be configured manually.
  • Animated mouse cursors are fully supported.
  • The standard mouse cursors are remapped to the cursor theme of the Unix desktop.
  • Joystick action mapping is supported, including a configuration dialog.
  • Font shaping and reordering is supported for all the scripts specified in the Unicode standard.
  • Wine can take advantage of the GStreamer framework for audio and video playback. This makes it possible to support all formats that have a GStreamer codec. On Mac OS X, the QuickTime framework is used for the same purpose.
  • The system tray is displayed as a task bar at the bottom of the screen in desktop mode.
  • The built-in Internet Explorer has a user interface, including a menu, an address bar, a tool bar, and configuration dialogs.
  • The Gecko engine is available on 64-bit.
  • Reloading sRGB textures uses either EXT_texture_sRGB_decode or FBO blits when available. This is much faster. This affects Source Engine games and Unreal Engine 3 games in particular.
  • WineD3D supports multisample anti-aliasing.
  • The WineD3D graphics card database has been updated to recognize new graphics cards and Mesa drivers.
  • Check the full list of changes and improvements in the release notes.

[How To]: Install Wine 1.4 on Ubuntu using PPA

The official repository is not updated yet for all Ubuntu releases. Stay tuned.PPA works on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

[sourcecode]sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.4[/sourcecode]

[How To]: Install Wine 1.4 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

So far, wine 1.4 RC 6 is currently available on the local repository. The latest stable release Wine 1.4 will be available soon on the local repository for Ubuntu Precise, you can install it by using the command down below.

sudo apt-get install wine

Download Wine 1.4 Stable source code.

Check other download options on the official Download page for other Linux distributions.

Wine 1.4 stable release announcement.