Wine: using Windows software on Linux

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
  • Arch Linux
• Use
• Bottles

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.

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

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.

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