Wine 1.2 gets a first release candidate

The Wine developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 1.2 of their Windows API implementation, marking the beginning of the code freeze period. Wine, which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native versions of Windows DLLs.

The latest development release features new toolbar icons, support for alpha blending in image lists and a more complete shader assembler. Other changes include video rendering fixes, support for Arabic font shaping and joining, font anti-aliasing configuration and improved desktop link files handling. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised.

More details about the first release candidate, including a full list of bug fixes and new features, can be found in the official release announcement. Wine 1.2 RC1 is available to download from SourceForge. The latest stable release is version 1.0.1 from the 17th of October of 2008. The final version of Wine 1.2 is expected to arrive "sometime in June".

See also:

• Wine 1.2 release plans announced, a report from The H.
• Wine update improves Direct3D and 64-bit support, a report from The H.
• Wine 1.0 is served - cheers!, a report from The H.

(crve)