14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few moments ago, the Wine team announced the availability of the fifth Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming and highly anticipated Wine 2.0 open-source implementation of Windows on Unix.
It looks to us like the Wine development team is wrapping things up in preparation for the launch of Wine 2.0 later this month, and RC5 is here just one week after the fourth Release Candidate build to address more of the issues that block the final release. According to the release notes, a total of 28 reported bugs were fixed in this version.
A very interesting fix in Wine 2.0 RC5 is support for copying and pasting between native applications like Mozilla Firefox, Apache OpenOffice, or GIMP, and various Windows apps supported by Wine, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Microsoft Excel.
Apart from that, there are the usual improvements for some other popular Windows applications that users want to use on their Linux boxes. Among these, we can mention Adobe Acrobat Pro 6, Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.01, Microsoft Silverlight, Radmin, DVDSubEdit 1.52, as well as Visual Web Developer Express 2008.
Adobe Lightroom 5.7 and Process Hacker 2.31 get improvements
The Adobe Lightroom 5.7, Process Hacker 2.31, Regedit, Google Sketchup 7 and 8, Ogar Server, and DK Design Suite apps also received improvements in Wine 2.0 RC5, along with the Mario Forever, Resident Evil 6, Runaway, Runaway 2, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Sexy Beach 3, Disney Universe, and Magic: The Gathering Online 4.0 games.
Other than that, we can see that this fifth Release Candidate of Wine 2.0 also fixes a regression that would not allow the Steam version of the Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000 game to launch. The rest are various other small improvements here and there to make sure that Wine 2.0 is the best release ever.
If you want to take it for a test drive, you can download Wine 2.0 RC5 right now, but please try to keep in mind that these are only the sources, which you'll need to compile on your GNU/Linux operating systems. Also, please note that this is still a development release, and you shouldn't use if for production work.