A few moments ago, the Wine development team was proud to announce the general availability of the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Wine 2.0 open-source software for running Windows apps on Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.
According to the release notes, Wine 2.0 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) prepares the software for its major Wine 2.0 launch, and it also marks the beginning of the code freeze period. As for the new features, you can notice great improvements to the Mono engine implementation, support for IDN name resolution, lots of Shader Model 5 operations, and a bunch of fixes in the regression tests.
“This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 2.0. It marks the beginning of the code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing to help us make 2.0 as good as possible,” reads today’s announcement, where we can also access the full changelog, which includes detailed information about all the 25 bug fixes implemented in Wine 2.0 Release Candidate 1.
TurboTax 2012. Necropolis, and Shadow Warrior 2 get improvements
Among the Windows applications and games that received improvements in this first Release Candidate version of Wine 2.0, we can mention ALDI Bestellsoftware 5.2.1.2111, Shadow Warrior 2, Explorer++ 1.2, Rayman 3 Demo, ToCA Race Driver 3, Windows Live Essentials 2011 web installer, MediaMonkey 4.1.x in Vista+ mode, Easy Video Cutter 2.3, as well as RPG Tkool (RPG Maker) 2k/2k3.
Additionally, Wine 2.0 RC1 makes Netflix work in 64-bit WINEPREFIX, and fixes various other bugs and crashes with the TurboTax 2012, Microsoft Excel 2007, Sniper Elite V2, Outlast 2 Demo, Fallout 4, Galactic Civilization III, Touhou 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, and Necropolis, all of which should work a lot better now on your GNU/Linux distribution. Wine 2.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download if you want to take it for a test drive, but please note that it’s still a development release.
