Saying that I don't like Windows would be an understatement. But now and then, need arises to run some windows software for some reason. For that good people of Wine Project have possible to run Windows applications on Linux operating system. In this article we will run Windows software with Wine on several popular Linux distributions. Namely Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian GNU/Linux. We will install it through terminal and then use it with GUI.
Installing Wine
On Debian, type following commands into terminal
su
dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt install wine
On Linux Mint and ubuntu
sudo apt install wine
On Fedora
sudo dnf install wine
Notice that different distributions install different versions of wine, Fedora is most cutting edge of distributions we test today, so it install wine 1.9.16.
If that is not new enough for you and you want bleeding edge version of wine you can install testing version with this commnad:
sudo dnf --enablerepo=updates-testing update wine
Lets start first by small Windows program on Fedora that is used to determine color code of some pixel on the screen. This program is called Pixie and can be downloaded here. It dos not require any install process you just download it and start it with wine. Right click on the icon and picking "Open with other application" should bring you this dialog window.
Select wine and you should get the program started
Windows games
So we tested wine with simple windows program. Next we try something more complicated. Note that we are working with virtual machines (debian, mint and Ubuntu) and optimus hardware (fedora) so the AAA games are out of the question. On your machine, you can test any game you like. We will use some free (as in beer) Windows game on Ubntu VM to test Wine.
The game is installed. If by any chance you don't see its icon on the desktop, know that Wine installs by default in ~/.wine/drive_c and there you will find program files for 32-bit and 64-bit programs, same as on real Windows. There you can make desktop icon. Lets play the game a little bit
Photoshop
Enough games, lets move to some serous work. Photo editing for example. For photo editing on Linux, I use and recommend GIMP. But some people have just grow accustomed to Photoshop and wont consider anything else. So for them, we will show how to run Photoshop portable on Linux Mint.
It will require some additional packages to be installed in order to run.
It might download gecko two times, don't worry, it is not an endless loop. It will continue with installation of Photoshop.
After it finishes, there is a little problem with running it. It requires version
We need to go to winecfg (type it in search bar it will show) and change from Windows XP to Windows 7 or some later version.
And voila, Photoshop runs
It is useful to know how to start wine application from terminal. If for example some application wont run, starting it with terminal will show you why is this happening. Lets start Photoshop from terminal.
It is enough to type wine program-name.exe while you are in directory where program is residing. It will give you very verbose output you can use for debugging. Photoshop runs happily so no reason for that now, but should a problem arise you know what to do.
Conclusion
Wine is the best way to run Windows software on Linux, and sometimes it is even running old software that new versions of Windows cant run anymore. But even regardless of that, there are many programs that wont run, or wont run satisfactory using Wine. So be sure to read WineHQ and file bug reports if some program you need doesn't work like it should. Wine is in constant development and regressions sometimes happen, some programs that worked in old version will sometimes stop working in newer one, so every bug report is valuable. With that we finish this article, thanks for reading and have a nice day.
The post How to Install Wine 1.9 on Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint appeared first on LinOxide.