The Wine developers, through Alexandre Julliard, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth and probably one of the last RC (Release Candidate) builds of the upcoming Wine 1.8 software.

We believe that by now every GNU/Linux user out there was thinking that Wine 1.8 will be officially unveiled this weekend, but the developers decided to publish yet another Release Candidate build of the software, which, of course, fixes even more issues discovered since the previous RC release.

"The Wine development release 1.8-rc4 is now available. What's new in this release (see below for details). Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze," said Alexandre Julliard in today's release announcement. "Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. Bugs fixed in 1.8-rc4 (total 26)."

26 bugs have been fixed in Wine 1.8 RC4

According to the changelog, the Wine developers managed to fix 26 bugs in Wine 1.8 RC4, and among the fixes we can mention better support for the Dolphin Smalltalk IDE, Sandboxie, Cockpit, BioEdit, WinNER5, Tencent RTX Client 2010, Miro 5.x/6.x, Gazillionaire, DVD Profiler, Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Winfiol, Ad-Aware 11.6.306.7947, PowerISO 6.4, and Desktop Holiday Light Windows apps.

Additionally, the fourth Release Candidate of Wine 1.8 fixes issues with multiple Windows games, including Buried in Time demo, The Network demo, Voyage: Journey to the Moon demo, RuneScape, Blade of Darkness demo, Heroes of the Storm 13.0.37117, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, and Original War.

At the moment, Wine 1.8 is still in code freeze, which means that only bugs are fixed, but looking at the changelog of the RC4 build, we can tell that there's not much to fix, and that the final release should arrive just before Christmas. If you want to help with the testing, download Wine 1.8 RC4 right now from Softpedia and report any bugs you might find.