14 DAY TRIAL // Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.34 has been released and is packed with quite a few important improvements, besides the regular changes that are made to support applications and games from the Windows platform.
People tend to think about Wine as an emulator for the Windows apps and games, but it's considered to be a compatibility layer. In fact, its makers compare Wine with the compatibility settings that can be found in newer Windows OSes. There is a performance penalty, but if users have a powerful enough system, it won't be all that noticeable.
The Wine devs have a couple of branches maintained, one stable and one not. The stable one hasn't been upgraded in quite a while, but the development one has been getting a lot of attention. In fact, you can take a look at the version number, 1.7.34, and you can see that they've been working on it for a long time.
Wine 1.7.34 has a few very interesting improvements
Most of the time, the improvements made to Wine don't seem to be all that important and many users look to see what games and various apps have been made to work since the previous release. This time it's a little different.
For example, the developers have finally added support for surround sound (through DirectSound), the text support for DirectWrite has been refined, lots of HTML engine fixes have been implemented, the support for WBEM objects has been improved, and quite a few other modifications have been implemented.
The list of supported games and apps for this version includes: Star Trek Klingon Academy, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Digital Photo Professional, X-Lite, Warcraft 3, Avant Browser, Ultracopier, Artemis 2.0, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Stronghold Kingdoms, Microsoft Office 2013, YouTube Downloader, Skype, Airport Tycoon 2, Windows 8.1 Media Creation Tool, Bus Simulator, and many others.
How to install the latest version of Wine in Ubuntu
Users can get Wine 1.7.34 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (with root access):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine
