Linux is a very flexible operating system that provides different options for other operating system applications users. Wine is a tool used to run Windows operating system applications like Office, Game, Desktop, Design, etc in a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali, Fedora, CentOS, etc.

What Is Wine?

Wine is known as an emulator but it describes itself as Wine Is Not an Emulator. Wine is designed to run Windows applications on POSIX compatible operating system Linux, MacOS, and BSD. It is mainly called a compatibility layer which will match application system calls with the underlying operating system calls. Wine converts Windows API calls into POSIX calls and prevents disadvantages of other emulations methods.

Install Wine Emulator

Wine can be installed in different ways like distro repositories or downloading the package from wine site.

Install For Ubuntu, Mint, Kali

We can install wine for deb based distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, and Kali with the following apt command.

$ sudo apt install wine

Install For Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and Kali From Wine Repositories

If we want to install the latest version which is provided by the Wine we need to add Wine repositories to the current distribution. If our system is 64 bit we need to enable the 32-bit library by adding i386 architecture to the dpkg.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Then we will add Wine repository key for security reasons

$ wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
$ sudo apt-key add winehq.key

and as the last thing, we will add the repository for the given Ubuntu or related distribution version.

Wine repository provides 3 main branch where the stable is suitable for most cases.

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging

Install For Fedora, CentOS, RedHat

We can install wine from official Fedora, CentOS and RedHat repositories with the following command.

$ sudo yum install wine

Install For Fedora, CentOS, RedHat From Wine Repositories

Wine also provides repositories for the latest version. First, we will add Wine repository with the following command.

$ dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/28/winehq.repo

Then we will install wine with the following dnf package manager.

Install Windows Application with Wine

We will download the Notepad++ installer executable from the following link.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/repository/7.x/7.6.3/npp.7.6.3.Installer.exe

And we will start the installation with the wine by just providing the executable name with a path like below.

$ wine npp.7.6.3.Installer.exe

We will see the following Windows style Notepad installation screen.

Wine Configuration and Installed Files

After finishing the installation wine will create some configuration files. There will be also installed application executable, dll, etc. files. All these files are stored in the user’s home directory .wine folder. We can list the content with the ls command like below.

$ ls /home/ismail/.wine

We can see that there are drive_c dosdevices and registry files like system.reg , userdef.reg, user.reg .

• drive_c is used to emulate classical Windows C drive where directories like Program Files, ProgramData, users, Windows are stored.

Wine configuration can be opened with the winecfg command which will provide configuration about Applications, Libraries, Drives etc.

Applications

Windows operating systems have different versions where some applications can work specific version. We can specify the application and working version with the Windows Version select box like below. We can also specify the default Windows version we want to emulate

Libraries

Dynamically Link Libraries can be specified individually to be either builtin (provided by Wine) or native (taken from Windows or provided by the application)

Graphics

We ca also specify the Graphics settings like automatically capture the mouse in full screen, allow the windows manager to decorate the windows etc. We can also specify screen resolution in dpi which is 96 dpi in this example.

Desktop Integration

Desktop related configuration can be done in the Desktop Integration pane where we can specify the Theme, Install Theme, Folders etc.

Drives

As all applications use partitions and drives to store binary files, dll’ and other data. We can specify the partitions from the drives menu change current drive or add and remove drives. Drives are matched to the target folder. By default C:  drive is targeted to the drive_c

Audio

In audio part we can specify different devices for Output, Video Output, Input, Video Input etc. We can also test the current audio configuration from the Test Sound button.

Staging

Staging pane will provide settings that are experimental and may break stuff. Make sure to reset them again in case of a problem.

About

This part provides information about the Wine tool. Also, we can set Windows registration information like Owner and Organization from this tab.

List Wine Supported Windows Applications

Wine has a great user base were supported and unsupported applications are documented regularly. Wine application database can be accessed from the following link  https://appdb.winehq.org/ . We can also see that there is a Top-10 Platinum List where most efficient and compatible applications and especially games are listed

How To Install Wine Emulator On Linux and Run Windows Applications? Infographic