Introduces initial support for Mandatory Integrity Control

Jan 17, 2017 01:06 GMT  ·  By

The road to Wine 2.0 and Wine Staging 2.0 continues, and while the former already got its fifth Release Candidate (RC) development release at the end of last week, the latter received yesterday a new unstable build.

That's right, we are talking here about Wine Staging 2.0 RC5, which comes hot on the heels of Wine 2.0 RC5 to add numerous goodies for those who want to run Windows apps and games on their Linux computers.

Among these, we can mention initial support for Mandatory Integrity Control and a bunch of extra PE loader improvements to allow it to support loading of packed executables with truncated headers, as well as on-the-fly section decompression.

It also looks like the 32GB memory limit was finally removed for 64-bit systems, and there's now initial support for Trust Info inside manifest files. But Wine Staging 2.0 RC5 also addresses a total of thirteen smaller Wine bugs, and contains all the 28 bug fixes included in the fifth Release Candidate of Wine 2.0.

"If you are using the 64-bit version of Wine, you may also benefit from the memory manager improvements, which allow applications to reserve/allocate more than 32 GB of virtual memory," reads the announcement. "The memory allocations are now only constrained by resource limitations of the hardware / the operating system and no longer by an artificial design limit in Wine."

Origin, GOG Galaxy, uPlay, and many other apps will work better

Another interesting change implemented in the Wine Staging 2.0 RC5 release is better compatibility for numerous apps that require either the Windows 7 or Windows Vista series of operating systems, such as Origin, GOG Galaxy, and Uplay. But many other similar apps should now work much better in Wine / Wine Staging.

That being said, if you are eager to test drive the new development release of Wine Staging 2.0, you can now download the Release Candidate 5 build from our website, where you'll also find the Wine 2.0 RC5 source package. However, please try to keep in mind that these are still pre-release versions, not suitable for production use.