Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that allows to run software developed for Windows on Unix-like operating systems.

Table of Contents

Install

Debian

  1. Enable 32bit packages. 
    sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
  2. Download and install the repository key. 
    wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
  3. Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list file or create a new .list file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/: 
    # For Debian 11
deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ bullseye main
# For Debian 10
deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ buster main
  4. Update repositories 
    sudo apt update
  5. Install winehq-stable. 
    sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

Arch Linux

  1. Enable the multilib repository by uncommenting the following lines in /etc/pacman.conf: 
    [multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
  2. Update repositories 
    sudo pacman -Sy
  3. Install wine and, optionally, wine-mono and wine-gecko. 
    sudo pacman -S wine wine-mono wine-gecko

Use

You can type wine and the .exe file that you want to run.

wine install.exe

Or you can right-click on the file and select Open With -> Wine. You don’t need to have special permissions to install Windows software.

Irfanview installation with Wine

Wine has a configuration program called winecfg where you can tweak some settings.

Wine Configuration

Bottles

Bottles “introduces a new way to handle Windows prefixes using environments, a combination of ready-to-use settings, libraries and dependencies”. You can run Windows applications like containers with an isolated enviroment.