14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers have just released a new Release Candidate for their application, bringing the version number up to 1.8 RC2.
Some of you might now know that some changes have been decided for the Wine project and that only one major stable update will be released once a year. The upcoming Wine 1.8 stable version is the first one in this series, which means that the next one will be launched in December 2016.
Wine stands for Wine is not an emulator, which is kind of funny since most people refer to it as an emulator. It’s, in fact, a compatibility layer, and its developers have said that it’s more like the compatibility feature that you can find in newer Windows systems. The application is also being used as a base for other others ones like CrossOver or PlayonLinux.
Wine 1.8 RC2 is just about the fixes
The Wine team informed us a few weeks ago that the project has entered feature freeze, which means that only bug fixes will be implemented. It also means that the changelog will get increasingly small as we approach the stable release.
Here are some of the games and applications that have received fixes: WORDPAD, Rhino 3D v3, DM Genie 2.x, NFS 4 Road Challenge, Eclipse (Europa), Roblox, CDBurnerXP 4.2+, IRPF Bolsa software, MP3VCR 0.4.17, Gunz, Diner Dash 2, Visio 2010, Office 2010, Excel Viewer 2007, Pokemon Zeta, Comanche 3, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, Blue Iris 3.x, Origin, Foxit Reader, San Andreas, MotoGP 3, BOINC 6.x/7.X, FEAR, Half-Life Opposing Force, BreezeBrowser, and many other apps and games.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.8 RC2 source packages right now from Softpedia. Don’t expect to see this particular version in the repos since most maintainers are probably waiting for the stable one.