Wine 9.0 RC arrives and these are the changes prepared so far

It seems that the Wine developers have liked to release the new development branches of Wine in these December dates and since the project began to receive greater attention (since Wine 2.x – 3.x the project reached a point where it seemed stagnant) and at least since I can remember since I have been publishing topics about Wine here on the blog.

And this time it is not the exception and the Wine developers announced a few days ago the launch of the first RC of what will be the new version and development branch of the Wine 9.0 project.

What's new in Wine 9.0's featured RCs?

Far Two Wine 9.0 RCs have been releasedBeing the first is the one with the greatest activity, Since the release of Wine 8.21 in the first RC of Wine 9.0, 52 bug reports have been closed and 391 changes have been made.

Of the most important changes presented the first RC (Wine 9.0-rc1) are:

• Integrated vkd3d 1.10 package update.
• The development of functionalities aimed at implementing the ability to use Wine in environments based on the Wayland protocol without the use of XWayland and X11 components has continued.
• Added support for keyboard layouts in the Winewayland.drv driver.
• Support for the Vulkan graphics API has been expanded and the functions vkQueuePresentKHR, vkGetDeviceGroupSurfacePresentModesKHR, vkGetPhysicalDevicePresentRectanglesKHR have been added.
• Added ClipCursor function and implemented the ability to work with relative coordinates when tracking mouse movement.
• When using recent versions of GnuTLS, support for DH (Diffie-Hellman) encryption keys has been implemented.

On the part of The second RC of Wine 9.0 (wine 9.0-rc2) made 33 changes in total and of which several of them are corrections and additions of improvements to RC1:

• Correction was made to Wayland's cursor, as it did not move on some surfaces
• EA Desktop does not install using French locale
• Improved support for high-level graphics settings in The Settlers: Heritage of Kings
• Winebus does not list hidden devices (in a build — without-sdl) unless
• SDL is also disabled via the Winebus registry key
• Borland Turbo CPP 4.5 installer crashed on startup
• Multiple 64-bit programs crash due to pointer truncation
• Solution to the problem with Wine when compiling on macOS with LLVM 17
• quartz:vmr9 – test_changed3ddevice() fails on w11pro64-amd and -nv virtual machines
• PLSQL: Crashes when trying to connect to a database.
• CrystalDiskInfo: Unhandled exception crashed DiskInfo64.exe

Finally if you want to know more about it about this new development version of Wine released, you can consult the log of changes in the following link. 

How to install the development version in Ubuntu and derivatives?

If you are interested in being able to test this new development version of Wine on your distro, you can do so by following the instructions we share below.

The first and most important step will be to enable the 32-bit architecture, that although our system is 64-bit, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur, since most of the Wine libraries are focused on 32-bit architecture.

For this we write about the terminal:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Now we must import the keys and add them to the system with this command:

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key

Done this now we are going to add the following repository to the system, for this we write in the terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository "deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -sc) main"
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get --download-only install winehq-devel
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel
sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade

Finally we can verify that we already have Wine installed and also what version we have in the system by executing the following command:

wine --version

How to uninstall Wine from Ubuntu or some derivative?

Finally for those who want to uninstall this development version of Wine from their system for whatever reason, They should only execute the following commands.

Uninstall the development version:

sudo apt purge winehq-devel
sudo apt-get remove wine-devel
sudo apt-get autoremove