Wine – Run windows app on Linux
Wine is a free & open source software application designed to run windows-based application on other operating systems. In English, using wine one can run any windows software (games including) in Linux!
Trivia: WINE is an acronym for WINdows Emulator or Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Wine for Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives
Wine is not a part of default repository that comes with the Ubuntu bundle. So as a first measure, we need to add the Wine repository to Ubuntu software sources.
Adding the WineHQ PPA Repository
Open “System Settings” by clicking on the top-right corner of the ubuntu desktop.
Open “Software updates” as shown below:
In the “Software & Updates” window, select ‘Other Software‘ and then click on ‘Add…‘ to get this:
Then, copy and paste the following: ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa.
Installing Wine
Open “Ubuntu Software Center“:
Type ‘wine‘ in the right-top corner textbox of the software center window, which is actually a search textbox. Click ‘Enter.’ You should get a list of all softwares related to wine. The one of interest to us is the top-most one titled ‘Microsofts Windows Compatibility Layer.‘ Select it and click ‘Install.’
Once installed you should be able to see a view like below where ‘Install’ button is replaced with ‘Remove.’
Voila! Installation done! 🙂
What next?
Configure Wine
This would be the first step I would suggest to do.
The major step is to configure wine to the windows version you are interested in. For instance, I am interested in “Windows 7” so change the ‘Windows version’ to ‘WIndows 7’.
This ensures that Wine will emulate Windows 7 behavior, if it would make any difference to the software you are going to install.
How to install?
Unfortunately, there is only one way to do it. Command line! First step, download the software you want to install. Next step is to install the package using wine as show below:
$> wine [full path of .exe file]
Done! 🙂
Install Wine using apt-get
Same as before we have to add Wine HQ repository to the software sources and install wine.
$> sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa $> sudo apt-get update $> sudo apt-get install wine
Done! 🙂
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