How to use Wine

First, “What is WINE?”. Well WINE is not an emulator (that’s what WINE stands for), instead it is “an open-source implementation of windows API”, and is designed to allow Linux users to run SOME windows applications in this API layer. API is “Application Program Interface” and is what most windows applications rely on to run. For more information about WINE, check out the site. There you can find out more about WINE, and how it works.

WINE is used to run programs that would normally only run on windows. Now, WINE cannot run all programs and most new software won’t work. However, it is constantly being improved, so what doesn’t work now, may well work in the future. The only real way to see if something works, is to actually try and run it “under WINE”, meaning running the program using WINE.

How do you get WINE. Well on the WINE site you can get the packages (or the source if you need to), which will allow you to install WINE. If using Ubuntu then the best way to do this is to add the repository to your apt-get list. Go here to find out how to do it. You will want to do this for your version of Ubuntu (if you followed my guide you will be using feisty). You can then install WINE using the package manager. Adding the repository also means you get the latest version when it is released.

There are two other programs that help to configure and use WINE. “WINEXS” is a program that provides a graphical front end to help install programs and configure wine. “WINEDoors” is a program which can install some windows programs for you (the list is increasing). This site can help you install them. That site also contains information about what programs are known to work under WINE.