In this article, we are going to talk about what Wine is and how you can install it on your Ubuntu system.
What Is Wine?
When Linux was first released, it had no support for applications that were developed natively for other operating systems. Fast forward to the present, Linux users can easily run Windows applications on their system using Wine, an open-source compatibility layer for Linux. You can even use Microsoft Excel on Linux using Wine.
Wine (originally an acronym of Wine Is Not an Emulator) supports Windows software and applications. The development of Wine has completely transformed gaming for Linux users. Similar compatibility layers such as Proton and CrossOver have also been developed to allow users to take full advantage of their Linux systems.
How to Install Wine on Ubuntu
There are multiple ways of installing Wine on Ubuntu. You can download the package using Ubuntu’s official package manager (Apt), get the package from the official WineHQ repository, or install it using app managers.
Install Wine With Apt
Before you can install Wine using Apt, you need to check whether you have an x86 flavor distribution or an x64 one. This is important because the packages for both of these flavors are different.
To check the flavor of your operating system, open up the terminal and type in:
Your screen will display an output that will look something like this.
Look for the Architecture label in the output. If it says x86_32, your computer is running x86 flavored Ubuntu, and if it’s x86_64, then you have Ubuntu x64 installed on your computer.
Now that you know which package you have to install, use the Apt package manager to get the package from official Ubuntu repositories.
Launch the terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T Install the Wine package using Apt. The package name for x86 flavor is wine32 and wine64 for x64 sudo apt-get wine32sudo apt-get wine64 Enter y/yes when the installation prompt comes up
After the installation is finished, check if Wine is correctly installed on your computer by typing wine –version in your terminal. You will see an output on your screen.
Download Wine From the WineHQ Repository
The WineHQ repository is the official repository for the Wine package.
Enter the command to enable 32-bit support on your machine sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386 Add the WineHQ signing key to your system wget -qO- https://dl. winehq. org/wine-builds/Release. key | sudo apt-key add - Run the following command to import a key from the Wine repository sudo apt-key adv –keyserver hkp://keyserver. ubuntu. com:80 –recv F987672F Use add-apt-repository to add the official Wine repository to your system’s repository list sudo apt-add-repository ‘deb https://dl. winehq. org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main’ Update your system’s package lists using Apt sudo apt-get update Download the stable version of Wine on Ubuntu sudo apt-get install –install-recommends winehq-stable Enter y/yes when asked for the installation prompt
Check if the latest version of Wine is installed on your system by typing wine –version in the terminal.
Running Windows Applications on Linux
Gone are the days when you had to use a Virtual machine or dual boot Windows and Linux together just for the sake of running a couple of games or apps. With open source compatibility layers like Wine and Proton, users can now enjoy the benefits of Windows applications on their Linux systems.
Similarly, you can also install Linux on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The support for multiple distributions in the WSL clearly demonstrates that Microsoft is now paying attention to open source projects.
