14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers have just revealed the new 1.9 development version of the Wine is now available for download, marking the launch of a new branch.
The Wine project changed gears a few months ago and announced that it planned to make some changes to the way the application is developed and released. As it stands right now, there will only be a major stable Wine release once a year and development versions throughout the year.
After the launch of Wine 1.8 just last week, it’s now Wine 1.9's turn, which is the first development branch. It’s not a big one, and it won’t draw any crowds, but it signals a new milestone for the project.
What's new in Wine 1.9 Dev
Wine 1.9 is now ready for testing, and it will be a while until it makes its way into repositories. According to the changelog, a number of fixes that were deferred during code freeze have been corrected, the WSAPoll implementation has been started, some font dialog fixes have been implemented, and a number of X11 drag & drop improvements have been integrated.
Wine 1.9 comes with changes to the following Windows games and tools: CorelDRAW 9, Pazuru Alfabet, Origin Pro, Liquid Story Binder, MinGW, Restricted Area, Windows Media Player, Eclipse Indigo SR1, Call of Duty 4, Phantasy Star Online: Ambition of The Illuminus, Alpha Centauri, FlashDevelop, HeeksCAD & HeeksCNC, PowerPoint Viewer 2010, Jade Empire Special Edition, Planetary Annihilation, Zararadio, and a few others.
This is very likely the last Wine release for this year, and we should see the project fall into a nice cadence after the holidays pass. As usual, only the source packages are available for now, so getting this installed won’t be an easy job.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.9 Dev source packages right now from Softpedia.