Wine 9.3 is Out with New HID Pointer Device Driver

Posted by warren February 24, 2024

Wine, the free open-source software for running Windows apps on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced a new development 9.3 release this Friday.

The new Wine 9.3 improved proxy configuration reading and writing by using new option to query global proxy settings, and wininet functions to set proxy settings.

The release also introduced a new HID pointer device driver, but only matches with digitizer devices for now, it could later be used for HID mice but for now wine use a different path for that.

Other changes in the release include timezone database update, more exception fixes on ARM platforms, and a total of 23 bug-fixes for apps and games, including Free Download Manager, Final Fantasy XI, Solidworks 2008, Virtual Life 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, and more. For more, see the official release note.

How to Install Wine 9.3 in Ubuntu

Wine provides official packages for Linux (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora), and macOS. User can follow the official guide in its website.

For Ubuntu users, simply open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the commands below one by one:

  • First, download & install the keyring (it should output unreadable text): 
    wget -qO - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key
  • Download & setup the sources file: 
    sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/$(lsb_release -sc)/winehq-$(lsb_release -sc).sources

    For Ubuntu based systems such as Linux Mint, do replace $(lsb_release -sc) with UBUNTU_CODENAME (e.g., jammy, focal) depends which Ubuntu version your system is based on (run cat /etc/os-release to tell).

  • Then, refresh system package cache: 
    sudo apt update
  • Finally, install the wine-stable package: 
    sudo apt install winehq-devel

Uninstall Wine

1. To remove the Wine package, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run commands:

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

There will be local configuration files and app data left under .wine and .local/share/applications. They are hidden folders, press Ctrl+H in file manager to toggle display and remove them as you want.

2. To remove the Wine repository, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq-*.sources

And remove the repository key via command:

sudo rm /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key

Finally apply changes by running sudo apt update to refresh system package cache.

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