Wine-Staging 8.2 Brings Support For Native ODBC Drivers Plus Fixes A 15 Year Old Bug

Following Friday's release of Wine 8.2, Wine-Staging 8.2 is now available that ships with more than 530 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base to provide various experimental/testing features.

It's been a while since having anything really exciting land in Wine-Staging that is worth writing about. But with Wine-Staging 8.2 that has changed and there's a few new patches worth calling out.

First and foremost, Wine-Staging 8.2 now allows using native ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) Windows drivers. Improving the native ODBC driver support has been a focus and with this release the Unicode drivers for MySQL and PostgreSQL were at least tested. Though there is the possibility of some bugs persisting in this initial support.

This bug report tracks the progress on native ODBC driver support for Wine. ODBC drivers under Wine have worked with MDAC previously, but that is limited to 32-bit support -- i.e. not working for 64-bit use.

Wine-Staging 8.2 also picks up a patch for addressing this bug report from 2007. The nearly sixteen year old bug is over no sound output under Wine for the real-time strategy game Rise of Nations.

Wine-Staging 8.2 also picks up patches to fix some rendering glitches in games like Batman: Arkham Knight, WAVE form loading to help software like DXRuby, lack of sound for various other games, and updating various existing patches that have been carried by Wine-Staging.

It's great to see Wine-Staging seeing some new patch activity around some notable feature work. Those wanting to download the latest Wine-Staging 8.2 builds can do so via WineHQ.org.