The Wine Boys continue to add their efforts and before the end of the year they have surprised us with new news and it is that recently announced the release of the first Release Candidate of Wine 5.0, this being the first version for testing of what will be the next stable branch of Wine.
Without a doubt Wine developers have worked hard to improve their software Since Valve took the project for the Proton base on Steam, the help they have received in Wine has been quite positive since many of us expected that the 4.xx branch would be a few more months.
For those who are still unaware of the Wine project you should know that this is a layer of the open source implementation of the Win32 API capable of running a Windows compatibility layer on Linux, MacOS, and BSD.
Wine is an excellent completely free alternative to the Windows API for GNU / Linux systems and you can also optionally use native Windows DLLs, if available.
Unless a specific Windows program is essential for you, in general it is advisable to try to find an alternative to the desired program in Linux first or choose a cloud solution.
Furthermore, Wine offers a development kit as well as a Windows program loader, so developers can easily modify many Windows programs that run under x86 Unix, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Main novelties of Wine RC 5.0
This first release candidate of Wine 5.0 the code base is expected has moved into the freeze phase prior to launch, which it would be arriving in late December or early January.
Compared to Wine 4.21, 37 bug reports have been closed and 475 changes have been made.
Of the most important changes that stand out in the ad is whate the Wine Gecko browser engine, which is used in the MSHTML library, has been updated to version 2.47.1. The Gecko Engine Download Code redesigned and the ability to run from a common install has been added which is not specific to Wine.
Added initial version of MSADO library (ActiveX Data Objects) with an interface to access and manipulate data through the OLE DB provider, for example, to connect programs to the SQL server.
Besides that work continued on transferring code from kernel32 to kernelbase and in the restructuring of these libraries. For example, ported Get / SetLocaleInfoW, GetStringType, LCMapString, CompareString, GeoID, FindFirst / NextFile, as well as functions for working with time zones. The code to initialize the kernel is partially ported to ntdll.
Regarding closed bug reports work related of games and applications: Microsoft Document Explorer 2008, wintetris 1.01, Midtown Madness 2, FIFA Online 3, FXCM Trading Station II, Symenu 4.11, DM Genie 2.x, VSDC Video Editor, Costume Quest 2, Geometry Wars 3, Chime, DxO Photolab 2, Football Manager 2017, IP Camera Viewer 4.x, Beat Hazard 2, Visual C++ Express 2005.
Of the other changes that stand out in the ad:
- Unicode tables updated to version 12.1.0. In ntdll, the functions for Unicode conversion have been redone.
- The WUSA (Windows Update Standalone) utility added support for installing updates;
- Bcrypt added support for ECDSA key signature verification of hashes.
- Many new features have been added to VBScript, including ScriptTypeInfo_ * and ScriptTypeComp_Bind.
Get Wine RC 5.0
Finally, for those interested in trying this previous version of what will be the next Wine branch, they should know that binary packages for now for the different Linux distributions offered directly by Wine Are not avaliables. Only code for compilation is available.
If you are a foodie and want to compile, you can get the code from the following link.
Otherwise, wait for the binaries and deb packages for Ubuntu and derivatives to be included in the Wine repo.