dwww Home | Show directory contents | Find package

Resources
=========
If you have any problems, the Wine FAQ is often very useful:
https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ

Detailed documentation about Wine and its internals are available in the
various User Guides and manpages:
https://www.winehq.org/documentation

For resources related to Debian Wine packaging, please visit:
https://salsa.debian.org/groups/wine-team

To participate in development and/or discussion about the Debian packages,
please subscribe to the Debian Wine mailing list:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-wine/

The Debian package repository can also be checked out with git:
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/wine-team/wine.git

Or viewed online at:
https://salsa.debian.org/wine-team/wine


Debugging
=========
Debugging information is limited to only error messages by default.  If you
want other types of debugging output as well, you can set the WINEDEBUG
environment variable.

Example:
$ WINEDEBUG=fixme+all wine

If you want this to be more permanent, you can include an
"export WINEDEBUG=fixme+all" line in your ~/.bashrc file.

For more detail about WINEDEBUG options, please see the wine manpage.


Old Versions
============
If you want to install a previous version of Wine, you should be able to fetch
prior Debian versions from:
http://snapshot.debian.org/package/wine/
http://snapshot.debian.org/package/wine-development/

You can also use debsnap from the devscripts package, for example:
$ debsnap -v -d . wine 1.6.1-1
$ debsnap -v -d . wine-development 1.7.24-3

debsnap fetches source packages by default, which you will then need to build
(see debuild).  debsnap also lets you fetch the binary packages with the
"-a <architecture>" option and then specifying each of the binary packages.


Alternative current versions
============================
You can choose between two sets of Wine packages: wine and wine-development.
wine tracks the stable releases from winehq.org (e.g. version 3.0.1), and
wine-development the development releases (e.g. version 3.7).

wine and wine-development use the Debian alternatives system to provide
/usr/bin/wine and other commands.  If both packages are installed it defaults
to use the commands provided by wine.  You may change this by running:
$ sudo update-alternatives --quiet --config wine

You may force a version at any time (as long as the wineserver isn't running
yet), by using the suffixed command names, e.g.:
$ wine-stable foo.exe
$ wine-development foo.exe
$ winecfg-stable
$ winecfg-development
$ winegcc-stable ...
$ winegcc-development ...


Configuring Wine's Options
==========================
Usually everything is automatically configured, but for fine-tuning a good tool
is winecfg.

If you want to set up Wine manually in a command line only setting, you can
force the creation of a ~/.wine directory by running:
$ wineboot

If something goes horribly wrong, you can always completely wipe your Wine
setup with "rm -rf ~/.wine".  This will destroy everything you've installed,
including configuration and data files, so if you have anything important,
please back it up first.  You can then start fresh.


Running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit systems
=====================================================
Most Windows binaries are 32-bit applications.  Next to the main package wine
(or wine-development) you need to install wine32 (or wine32-development) to run
them.  wine64 (or wine64-development) alone cannot do this.

On 64-bit systems you need to enable multiarch to install wine32 (or
wine32-development).  As root, execute e.g.:
# dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt update && apt install wine32
# dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt update && apt install wine32-development

If you have wine32 and wine64 (or wine32-development and wine64-development)
installed, Wine will default to a shared 64-bit prefix that runs most 32-bit
Windows applications (WoW64).

If this causes problems for an application, you may create a 32-bit prefix by
running e.g.:
$ WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine32" wineboot

You have to specify this 32-bit prefix, whenever you want to use it, e.g.:
$ WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine32" wine application.exe

If you don't want 64-bit at all, just uninstall wine64 (or
wine64-development).


32-bit results from the tools (winegcc, ...) on 64-bit systems
==============================================================
You may generate 32-bit results with the programs in wine32-tools (or
wine32-development-tools) as well as with those in wine64-tools (or
wine64-development-tools).

Enable multiarch (see above).  Than install the matching 32-bit Wine
development files.  As root, execute e.g. on amd64:
# apt install libwine-dev:i386
# apt install libwine-development-dev:i386

Use the programs with the option "-m32" (for winemaker --wine32).


Wine Gecko
==========
The downloader for Wine Gecko is intentionally disabled in the Debian packages.

Instead libwine-gecko-* packages used to be available in the official Debian
archives.  However as of October 2018 the last available versions are for Wine
in Debian 8 (Jessie).  So help in packaging new versions is really needed.

Information about which Wine Gecko should be associated with any particular
Wine version is available at:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

Information about available versions in Debian is at:
https://packages.debian.org/wine-gecko

If the right libwine-gecko-*.deb package is not currently available, you can
download the Wine Gecko installers (on 64-bit systems you need both the 32-bit
and the 64-bit version).  Copy them to one of the following locations (their
checksums only get verified in $HOME, but not in /usr/share/):
- /usr/share/wine/wine/gecko/ or /usr/share/wine-development/wine/gecko/
- /usr/share/wine/gecko/ or /usr/share/wine-development/gecko/
- /usr/share/wine/gecko/
- /usr/share/wine-gecko/
- /opt/wine/gecko/
- $XDG_CACHE_HOME/wine/
- $HOME/.cache/wine/ (if XDG_CACHE_HOME is not set)
Or preferably, please provide help building the new Debian libwine-gecko-*
package that is needed.


Wine Mono
=========
The downloader for Wine Mono is intentionally disabled in the Debian packages.
Unfortunately Wine Mono is not available in the official Debian archives.

You can find more information at:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

You can download the Wine Mono installer and copy it to similar locations as
shown for Wine Gecko above, just replace gecko with mono.


System and desktop integration
==============================
You can configure your system to automatically launch Windows executables.  But
this increases the risk of inadvertently launching Windows malware, so please
make sure that you understand the security risks before blindly setting this
up.  See this discussion for some details:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/256880


System integration (binfmt)
---------------------------
If you install the wine-binfmt package, Wine will be registered as interpreter
for Windows executables.  Note that each executable has to be in a directory
that is in your system PATH (or its path must be fully specified) and the
executable mode bit (+x) must be set on the file.

Once that is done, "./foo.exe" can be used instead of "wine foo.exe" to launch
Windows PE files.  Please take note that once this is enabled, Windows
executables (including malware) might get auto-started this way, even as root.

This feature is probably most interesting for automatic software testing.
Desktop users probably don't need it, so don't install wine-binfmt, unless you
know that you need it.


Desktop integration
-------------------
To make Wine known to your desktop environment you can install a wine.desktop
file.  Then you may e.g. double-click on Windows executables in a filebrowser
to start them, or right-click on them to "Open With Wine Windows Programs
Loader".

Enable system-wide:
$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop /usr/share/applications/
or
$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/wine-development/examples/wine.desktop /usr/share/applications/

Enable only for your current user:
$ cp /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
or
$ cp /usr/share/doc/wine-development/examples/wine.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

Remove:
$ sudo rm -f /usr/share/applications/wine.desktop
$ sudo update-desktop-database
$ rm -f ~/.local/share/applications/wine.desktop
$ update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/


Opening files with Windows applications (MIME)
----------------------------------------------
Some applications register themselves for opening files of a specified type.
Generally these associations are propagated to your Linux desktop, so that you
can directly open files with the matching Windows application.

Creation of these associations is disabled for some common file types to avoid
unwanted associations with general purpose Windows applications, while a
preferred native application exists (e.g. it prevents .txt files from being
opened with Wine's notepad instead of your system's preferred editor).

To remove all these file type associations:

$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/applications/wine/
$ rm -f ~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-*
$ update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/

The Wine FAQ has further information on this topic.

Generated by dwww version 1.15 on Sat May 18 11:57:35 CEST 2024.