Wine 1.4 (Stable) Released

After 20 months of development, a new stable Wine version has been released: 1.4, bringing a new DIB graphics engine, re-written audio stack which can make use of Gstreamer, full support for bidirectional text, ARM support and more. There are also many new supported applications, like Microsoft Office 2010.

Wine 1.4 release highlights:

• New graphics engine for rendering into Device Independent Bitmaps (DIB). DIB can also be used as a fall-back for some graphics primitives, like alpha blending, when the driver doesn't supports it
• More image codecs are implemented, including support for TGA and CMYK JPEG decoding, as well as BMP, TIFF, PNG, and ICNS encoding.
• The audio stack is completely redesigned, based on the Vista model
• The Alsa, OSS, and CoreAudio drivers have been rewritten to use the new model
• The Jack, NAS, AudioIO, OSS3 and ESD audio subsystems are no longer supported
• Joystick action mapping is supported, including a configuration dialog
• Full support for bidirectional text
• New Vista style file dialogs
• Wine can now make use of GStreamer for audio and video playback
• Implemented system tray notification balloons
• The built-in (Gecko-based) web browser engine supports ActiveX
• Dynamic device management can use the new UDisks service in addition to HAL
• Wine now compiles on ARM too

For a complete changelog, see THIS page.

Install Wine 1.4 in Ubuntu

Ubuntu Oneiric, Natty, Maverick and Lucid users: Wine 1.4 is not yet available in the Wine PPA, but it should be available soon. If you don't want to wait, you can install Wine 1.4 release candidate 6 by using the commands below (you should receive an update when Wine 1.4 final will be available in the PPA):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.3

The package name is "wine-1.3" because that's the development build for Wine 1.4.

Wine 1.4 will be available in the Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin repositories (currently, Precise has Wine 1.4 RC6), so there's no need to add a PPA if you're using Precise. Installing the "wine" package should install the latest Wine 1.4 (RC6).

Download Wine 1.4

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Install Picasa 3.9 In Linux And Fix Google Sign In Issue [Wine]

Picasa 3.9 was released a while back and among the new features are: share pictures to Google Plus, Picasa name tags for Google Plus, new photo editing effects and side by side editing.

Unfortunately, logging in to your Google account using Picasa 3.9 doesn't work by default in Linux, either using the regular Picasa 3.9 Wine installation or the more advanced installation that makes Picasa integrate with GNOME:

• simply installing Picasa 3.9 using Wine: when you click the "Sign in with Google Account" link, you get a blank window
• installing Picasa 3.0 via Google repository and then merging it with Picasa 3.9: the login window displays a "One moment please" message and never gets past it

But there is a fix for the Picasa 3.9 sign in bug! The "trick" is simply to install Internet Explorer 6 using Winetricks, which is required because Picasa 3.9 uses Google OAuth. Without IE6, the login window stays blank.

Install Picasa 3.9 in Linux (using WINE) and fix the Google sign in issue

1. Install Wine and Winetricks. For Ubuntu, use the commands below:

sudo apt-get install wine winetricks

For older Ubuntu versions (like 10.04) which don't have Winetricks available in the repositories or other Linux distributions, install Winetricks using the following commands:

cd
wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/winetricks

2. Install Picasa 3.9:

cd && wget http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa39-setup.exe
wine picasa39-setup.exe

3. To be able to login to your Google account using Picasa 3.9, you must install Internet Explorer 6 via Winetricks by running the following command:

winetricks ie6

If you get an error (link not found) and the Internet Explorer 6 setup doesn't start, you can manually download Internet Explorer 6 from HERE (click the "Internet Explorer 6 (full)" link). Then, place the downloaded "ie60.exe" file under the ~/.cache/winetricks/ie6/ folder (".cache" is a hidden folder in your home directory so press CTRL + H to see it). And finally, run:

winetricks ie6

Now the Internet Explorer setup should start:

Once you finish the installation, run "Picasa 3" from the menu / Dash. Now click the login link on the Picasa top right corner - the Google/Picasa login should now work.

Please note that the login window is initially blank and will probably stay like that for a few seconds - don't close it, if you've done everything as stated above, you should see the Google login page soon.

Update (thanks to Dragos for the tip!): you can also use this for the old Picasa installation guide which provides desktop integration. Just follow that guide, install Winetricks and instead of running "winetricks ie6", use the following command:

env WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.google/picasa/3.0/ winetricks ie6

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