As you may know, Wine Staging is a special version of Wine that provides support for projects like Pipelight. The Pipelight developer forked wine into wine-staging and included some Pipelight-specific enhancements and some other features not present in the regular wine software.
Among others, it brings support for Nvidia graphics cards with support for CUDA, PhysX and NVENC plus CSMT to improve graphics performance and a few others.
The latest version available is Wine Staging 1.9.7, which has been recently released, bringing changes:
- Enable the correct dialog owner in DIALOG_DoDialogBox
- Implement support for converting 16 bit depth to 24 bit in msvidc32
- Allow 320×240 as supported resolution in desktop mode
- Fix implementation of ICGetDisplayFormat
- Handle stack guard pages on x86_64
- Improve compatibility of IMILBitmapSource interface
- Fix IStream::Read() return value for partial reads
- Implement image hash verification in WinVerifyTrust
- Implement oleaut32.OleLoadPictureFile (GoodSync)
- Fix return value of RegNotifyChangeKeyValue for pending events
- Add support for paste in item context menu
- Fix implementation of cut file operation
- Recognize cut/copy/paste verb strings in context menus
- Add ‘New’ context menu handler registry entry for directories
- Add implementation for fsutil.exe hardlink command
- Add stub for ntoskrnl.IoGetDeviceAttachmentBaseRef
- Return stub interface from mf.MFCreateMediaSession
Installation instructions:
Up to date Wine Staging packages are available via the developer’s PPA, so installing the software on Ubuntu is easy. Just add the PPA to your system, update the local repository index and install the wine-staging package:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install --install-recommends wine-staging
If you want the 64 bit version of wine-staging also install the wine-staging-amd64 package:
$ sudo apt-get install wine-staging-amd64
Wine Staging can be used along wine because it installs in /opt/wine-staging, while the regular wine can be found in /opt/wine.
The installation instructions should work on all the supported Ubuntu systems and derivatives: Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Deepin 2014, Peppermint Five, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2.