Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97

Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.

Wine 9.8 updates the Mono engine to v9.1, improves RPC/COM support on ARM platforms, IDL-generated files now use fully interpreted stubs, and there are 22 known bug fixes.

The 22 bug fixes this cycle range from fixing a Microsoft Office 97 installer issue to Battle.net launcher problems to various other software issues now being resolved.

The Microsoft Office 97 installer issue dates back to this bug report from 2005 around Wine at the time failing to install Office 97 on upstream Wine. After on and off activity over the years, it was finally worked through in Wine 9.8 for stdole32.tlb to generate the typelib in SLTG format.

More details on all the changes to find with Wine 9.8 can be found via today's release announcement.