After 16 months of development, a new stable Wine version has been released: 1.6, bringing around 10,000 changes, including full support for window transparency, a new Mono package for .NET application support well as a new Mac driver.
Among the changes in the latest Wine 1.6 are:
- Window transparency support, including both color keying and alpha blending transparency;
- All window rendering is now done on the client-side using the DIB engine (except for OpenGL rendering). This means that rendering to windows or bitmaps gives identical results;
- X11 server-side font rendering is no longer supported. All fonts are rendered client-side using FreeType;
- There are significant performance improvements in the DIB engine, particularly for text rendering, bitmap stretching, alpha blending, and gradients;
- Sub-pixel font anti-aliasing is now supported in the DIB engine, using the system anti-aliasing configuration from FontConfig;
- Raw input support for keyboard and mouse;
- There is a joystick applet in the control panel, to allow configuring joysticks and testing their behavior;
- Support for Randr 1.2 and 1.3;
- DOSBox is tried first when running a DOS application. The Wine DOS support is only used as a fallback when DOSBox cannot be found, and will be removed in a future release;
- Wine can now be configured to report the Windows version as 'Windows 8';
- The Mono runtime is packaged as an MSI file, and its installation can be managed from the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. It is automatically installed on Wine prefix updates;
- The Microsoft .NET 4.0 runtime can be installed for cases where Mono is not good enough yet;
- HTTPS connections use GnuTLS (or Secure Transport on Mac OS X). OpenSSL is no longer used;
- The Direct3D 9Ex implementation is more complete;
- Improvements to various parts of the D3DX9 and Direct3D 10 implementations;
- Audio device enumeration has been improved, and multi-channel devices are better supported;
- VMR-9 video rendering has been implemented;
- On Linux, dynamic device management supports the UDisks2 service;
- Building Wine for the ARM64 platform is now supported;
- Preliminary support for building Wine for Android using the Android NDK;
- A native Mac OS X driver has been implemented, for better integration with the Mac desktop environment. The full range of driver features are supported, including OpenGL, window management, clipboard, drag & drop, system tray, etc.
The official Wine 1.6 release announcement also mentions "support for many new applications and games" however, I couldn't find a list for this.
Install Wine 1.6 in Ubuntu
You can install the latest stable Wine 1.6 in Ubuntu and derivatives (Linux Mint, etc.) by using its official PPA. Add the PPA and install Wine using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.6Download Wine
