[FAQ] Installing Wine

Wine: An introduction and Installation Guide

Undoubtedly, when you migrated to your new linux installation, there were programs you used on Windows that you cannot find a suitable substitute for in linux programs. However, all hope is not lost. There is a program called Wine, which installs on linux and allows you to install and run most Windows programs in a linux environment.

There are several ways you can get Wine. Depending on your distro, you may have many different package management programs available to you. In this guide, I will cover installing Wine from a console with both APT, Yum, and Slackware.

Installing with APT
If you have APT available to you, you'll need to start by opening a console. To run APT, you'll need to be root. However, to prevent you from accidentally doing damage to your system, we will use sudo to only run a single command as root.

We need to add Wine's repositories to APT, so it is able to download the files neded to install Wine.

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Use one of the following commands, depending on your distribution with APT: (Commands from winehq.org)

For Ubuntu Feisty (7.04):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/....d/feisty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

For Ubuntu Edgy (6.10):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/...st.d/edgy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

For Ubuntu Dapper (6.06):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/....d/dapper.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

For Debian Etch (4.0):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/...st.d/etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

And to make sure the repos are enabled, we need to update APT.

sudo apt-get update

Now that you have the repositories enabled and APT knows where to get the files from, it's time to install Wine. It's really not terribly difficult.

sudo apt-get install wine

Now that Wine is installed, go ahead and jump down to the Using Wine section.

Installing with Yum
If you are using RedHat or Fedora, you will want to use Yum to install Wine as it is an incredibly simple process. All you need to do is run

su

And then

yum install wine

You're done! Now check out the Using Wine section.

Installing with Slackware
These instructions are from dangerousHobo, thankyou!
First you need to update glibc from 2.3 to 2.5. You can download the three packages you need here.

ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/...2.5-i486-2.tgz
ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/...2.5-i486-2.tgz
ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/...2.5-i486-2.tgz

Install them by typing: installpkg glibc-*.tgz
then you can install wine.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ackage_id=6301
and install that with: installpkg wine*.tgz

Now you can go ahead and configure.
Using Wine
So, now you've got Wine installed, but, how in the world do you get it to do anything? First, you need to know that Wine makes a “clone” of a Windows system, including C, a Windows folder, Program Files, My Documents, and anything else that a program would need to install itself. These are all accessible from your Home folder.

Before you start using Wine, you'll need to configure it. To do so, run

winecfg

Most of the settings here are self-explanatory. One thing to note is that though the default version of Windows is 2000, many programs work better with Windows 98 set, so keep that in mind if you are having issues. Once Wine is configured, you can start using it. Below are some basic Wine commands for you to start playing with. Most applications install Start Menu entries that appear in your desktop environment's Application menu, however, you can also launch programs manually. These are also useful for running programs that do not have installers, or running the installers themselves.

Running a .exe file
wine /yourlocation/program.exe

Accessing the Control Panel
wine control

Menu to uninstall programs
uninstaller

Running a .msi file (program installer)
wine msiexec /i /yourlocation/file.msi


That's it! You've now installed Wine and you hopefully have a basic idea of how to use it. If you ever get lost, helpful resources include www.winehq.org, as well as Google. Thank you for reading, and

Hobo could probably help you more with that one that I could. I don't even know what version of glibc ships with Slack, let alone which versions are needed for Wine. :

It's a Debian based distro, and DSL has included scripts to install APT, if you wanted to go that route.