Friday 12 September 2008

How-To: Compile and Install Wine 1.1.4 in Ubuntu 8.04

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Wine 0.9.59, which is already pretty old. In the meantime, the latest development version of Wine is 1.1.4, which was released on September 5, 2008.

In order to compile Wine from source and install it on Ubuntu, you will only need to follow several easy steps I list below:

1. Enable the sources repositories
Make sure you have a line in the /etc/apt/sources.list file which says something like:

deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse

Next, update the packages list:

sudo apt-get update

2. Install the Wine dependencies
This will also install the build-essential meta package if it's not already installed:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

3. Download the Wine 1.1.4 source tarball, compile and install
Download the source from the official website (direct link here), uncompress it, change the current working directory to wine-1.1.4 and type the command:

./tools/wineinstall

If the configuration goes smooth, you'll be presented with a message similar to the one below:

configure: Finished. Do 'make depend && make' to compile Wine.


We need to install wine as root user, do you want us to build wine,
'su root' and install Wine? Enter 'no' to continue without installing
(yes/no)

Type no, wait for Wine to be compiled, then use:

sudo make install

To install Wine.

4. Run Wine
Run winecfg as normal user in order to configure it, then use it like wine WIN_APP.EXE in order to start Windows applications. You can see where the binary was installed by typing:

whereis wine

And to see the version:

wine --version

This should be all.

Resources
Wine homepage
Wine applications database
Wine Wiki

Updated: Sep 12, 2008

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although that will work, it's not a good way to install software on Ubuntu. Better is to make a .deb package and install that, but that's a more complicated procedure. On the other hand, it won't give you the problems this other way inevitably will lead to.

johnH said...

You shortcutted some of the instructions to install Wine 1.1.4, so that I could not follow all the steps. You made some assumptions that we are all experts in compiling applications. I got lost in the part of changing he active directory. I kept getting "directory not found" for the Wine 1.1.4.

Maybe you could add some steps so that we readers can follow and learn how to do this in Linux.

Thanks

Alan Moore said...

Or... you could just follow the instructions on this page at winehq and have the latest version automatically install via your usual upgrades.

Anonymous said...

wine your application name
and
wine YOUR\ APPLICATION\ NAME.EXE
will both start the process you are trying to start from the applications install directory.

Also you can combine two steps:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get build-dep wine

Note: in doing this you will be installing more libraries and headers than you need to build wine for your system.

Craciun Dan said...

Thank you all for the positive feedback.

johnH: No, I'm not an expert in compiling applications, but I'll modify the tutorial accordingly.

Alan Moore: You actually gave me a good idea, probably I'll have a post in the following days on the most popular ways of installing the last release of Wine.

TheEditor said...

You could do that. But it's MUCH easier to just download a pre-compiled package.

Go to the winehq.org site -> Get wine now -> Ubuntu.

You'll come to these [http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb] instructions on how to add a package repository for Wine.

Then you just use Synaptic or add/remove programs.

Anonymous said...

WINE 1.1.4 appeared in the Mandriva Linux 2008.1 updates within a couple of days of it being released. No need to build it, it was a simple update, part of the normal update cycle.

tracyanne