Install and configure Wine

Wine is a platform that allows you to install native software for Windows on any Linux distribution, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other * nix operating systems. And although it is downloadable and installed from many distribution repositories, including the Ubuntu Software Center, the Ubuntu Software Center versions are not very up-to-date.

Por eso we will teach you step by step to download, install and start using Wine on your favorite drive. But the first thing is to know the requirements, and these are easy to meet, since you only need a Unix-like system, and a 86-bit x32 or an x86-64 computer. With Wine you can install original applications and video games for Windows 32 and 64 bits, since it supports Win64 and Win32 and you can even install DirectX for games.

Install Wine on any Linux distribution:

If you access the official website of the Wine project you can get the packages for different distributions (DEB, RPM) and other operating systems. But to make it more generic, let's explain the method used to install Wine on any distro from source code:

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• Download the source code package from here. It is in the section where it says “Wine Source Downloads” and we choose, for example, the sourceforge.net link.
• Unpack the tarball, in this case it is Wine 1.7.38. To do this, the first thing to do is go to the directory where it was downloaded. For example, if you have it in Downloads, you can use the command:

cd Descargas

• Now we must unpack the tarball. As in this case it is a tar.bz2 we type in the terminal:

tar -xjvf wine-1.7.38.tar.bz2

• Now we will have created a directory called wine-1.7.38 in Downloads. We enter it:

cd wine-1.7.38

• Remember that if the directory is called differently, you will have to modify the commands to suit your case ... Having said that, we will proceed to compile and install:

./configure
make depend
make
sudo make install

• In case of being for 64 bits (You may need to use "make install" privileges, for this use sudo):

./configure --enable-wine64
make
sudo make install

Now we have it installed. The next thing is to learn how to use it to install Windows software in our Linux environment. First we are going to verify that the installation has been successful by checking if it was installed and what version we have. And depending on whether it is for 32 or 64 bits, we do:

./wine --version
./wine64 --version

Install Windows software on Linux thanks to Wine:

Would be highly recommend that you install some tools such as Winetricks (avoids having to install the DLL libraries on your own), PlayOnLinux (a plugin that solves problems and configures Wine in the best possible way for a specific software) or Mono (a project to install applications that depend on .NET on Linux). Remember that when you install a Windows video game or program, you may need some DLL libraries (just search the web for their name and downloads) or some dependencies such as .NET Framework, DirectX, etc. In which case you would install them in Wine.

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But with an example you will see it more clearly. For example, we are going to install the Microsoft Office suite on Linux using Wine. The steps, once we have the program installer in our possession, are the following:

• Download and install Play On Linux from the web. With this program you can automate the setup of Wine to install specific software and avoid possible problems.

• Now we open Play On Linux and we click on the Install button. Then in the Office category and we look for the version of Office that we are going to install. For example, in our case 2007.
• We insert the Office CD in our disk drive and we follow the installation steps that Play On Linux marks us. We will also be given the option of locating the .exe installer elsewhere, such as the hard drive in the case of not having it on CD.
• The normal Office installer will be launched as you would in Windows. We follow the steps, enter the serial and we will have it ready to use. What Play On Linux has allowed us is a special configuration of Wine for Office without having to do it manually. It takes a lot of work believe me ...

Now you will see the Office icons and you can open them to see that everything works at 100%. Another option is to start a Windows program from the terminal, instead of using its icon, for that we can type the following in the terminal:

wine nombre_programa_windows
wine64 nombre_programa_windows