Wine 4.4 Released with New MSIDB Tool, More Media Foundation APIs

Last updated: March 16, 2019

Wine Stable

Wine 4.4, a new development release of the open-source compatibility layer to run Windows apps on Linux, was released a day ago.

Wine 4.4 release highlights:

  • New MSIDB tool for manipulating MSI databases.
  • Support for custom draw buttons in common controls.
  • Many more Media Foundation APIs implemented.
  • A total of 50 bug-fixes.

How to Install Wine 4.4 in Ubuntu:

As usual, Wine’s official apt repository has built the new release packages for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 18.10.

Open terminal either via Ctrl+Alt+T or by searching ‘terminal’ from app launcher. When it opens, run following commands one by one to and the repository and install Wine:

1. Add the official wine apt repository for Ubuntu 18.04 or Linux Mint 19 via command:

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'

For other Ubuntu releases, replace bionic in the code with

  • trusty for Ubuntu 14.04
  • xenial for Ubuntu 16.04, Linux Mint 18.x
  • cosmic for Ubuntu 18.10.

2. Download and install the GPG keyring via command:

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

3. Finally refresh system package cache and install the latest Wine development package via commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel

If you got dependencies issue, install aptitude (sudo apt-get install aptitude) and replace apt-get in last command with aptitude.

Read more about installing Wine in Ubuntu.

Uninstall:

To remove wine dev release, simply run command in terminal:

sudo apt-get remove --autoremove winehq-devel

And you can remove the repository via Software & Updates utility under Other Software tab.

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2 responses to Wine 4.4 Released with New MSIDB Tool, More Media Foundation APIs

  1. Uh…no. The WineHQ repositories haven’t been updated since wine 4.0~rc2 back in December.