After more than 16 months of development and about 10,000 individual changes, Wine, the software that lets you run programs designed for Windows in Linux systems has just released version 1.6 and this brief tutorial is going to show you how to upgrade or install it in Ubuntu.
This release brings improvements across the board as well as support for many new applications and games. Although not all Windows programs are supported, the most popular ones including games are able to run ok on Linux machines, including Ubuntu. For more about this release, please check out the complete changelog.
So what’s new in Wine 1.6
- Window transparency is supported, including both color keying and alpha blending transparency
- Input validation is improved in the date and calendar controls
- OpenGL rendering is supported in device-independent bitmaps using libOSMesa.
- NTLM and Negotiate authentication protocols are supported
Here’s the complete changelog for more information about what was released, enhanced and added.
If you ever want to run your favorite Windows programs in Ubuntu, Wine is the way to do it. In this post, we showed you how to use Wine to install Microsoft Office 2010 Suite easily and it works. Without Wine, it will be virtually impossible to do it. So say thanks to the folks behind this project and other projects who are making Linux fun.
To get started install Wine in Ubuntu, press Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open the terminal or console. When it opens, run the commands below to add its PPA repository.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
Next, run the commands below to update your machine and install Wine.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine1.6
That’s it!