The first maintenance release of the Wine software got released earlier today, version 1.8.1, bringing a bunch of fixes and improvements for various Windows applications and games.

According to the release notes, Wine 1.8.1 fixes 24 issues, and among the most important ones we can mention fixes for various crashes with the Internet Explorer 3.01 web browser, a fix for the Gyldendal dictionary, winverbs improvements, and a fix for a crash with the 64-bit StarCraft II v3.0 client.

There's also better support for the Umax Astra 4100 USB scanner driver installer, some Any Video Converter (AVC) crashes were resolved, the "You must use msvcrt" error has been fixed, the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow demo now works after the intro movies, and some issues with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game were fixed.

The GTA IV, Cobra 11 - Burning Wheels demo, Worms Armageddon, GameRanger, BioEdit, Zararadio, and StarCraft II 64-bit client also received some minor improvements in Wine 1.8.1, which you can download right now from our website or wait for the new version to arrive in the main software repositories of your OS.

Wine 1.8 will get a few more maintenance releases this year, but the team is already working hard on the next major version, Wine 1.10 (the development branch is Wine 1.9.x), and you can help them testing it by reporting bugs and other annoyances.