How To Install Wine On Ubuntu?

In this article, we will learn about Wine software and learn to install Wine on Ubuntu.

What Is Wine?

Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that aims to provide allow computer games and application software developed for Windows Operating System to run on Unix-like systems. It also provides a software library to facilitate compiling Windows applications porting to Unix-like systems.

Wine provides the API used in Windows Operating Systems to serve Windows-based programs and games on Unix-like Operating Systems.

Wine implements the Windows Application Binary Interface (ABI) entirely in userspace, rather than as a kernel module. It mostly mirrors the hierarchy, with services normally provided by the kernel in Windows instead provided by a daemon known as the wineserver.

Let’s look at the process to install it on Ubuntu. Installation on Wine is a cakewalk and benefits the user with lots and lots of Windows applications accessibility.

Step 1: Start by checking the installed architectures on your machine using the following command:

dpkg --print-architecture

Printing System Architectures

If “i386” (32-Bit Architecture) is not displayed, execute the following command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Recheck by using the same command again and you should find “i386” at the output.

Step 2: Add the repository to download Wine using the following commands,

This command will download the repository key

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

Install the repository key using the command given below

sudo -H gpg -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/winehq.key.gpg --dearmor winehq.key

Up to here, we’ve installed the repository key, what remains to be done is to add the repository.

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main

Update the repositories using,

sudo apt update

Now we are all done with the repository setup, let’s move to the final steps.

Step 3: Installing Wine

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

Wait for the installation to complete.

Step 4: Checking if Wine is installed or not

wine --version

Wine Version

Popular Windows Applications to Use on Linux Systems Using Wine

Below is the list of some of the most popular Windows-based applications to install and use on Linux devices through Wine.

Notepad++

Notepad++

It is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment.

LTspice

Ltspice

The LTspice® simulator is a high-performance SPICE simulation software, schematic capture, and waveform viewer. It also supports enhancements and models for easing the simulation of analog circuits.

TinyCAD

TinyCAD

It is a nice open-source application for designing circuits, but it’s only available for Windows. While it is a small application, it does incorporate some .NET components.

OneNote

OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is an app that is designed for research, note-taking, and information storage. Similar to apps like Evernote and Dropbox Paper, it lets you store text and images in free-form documents which you can keep private or share with others.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned about wine software and its installation on Ubuntu. Later, we also looked at some important and widely used applications which natively run on Windows, using Wine these can run on Ubuntu and other Linux distros as well.

References

To learn more about Wine, you can refer to the following sites,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

https://www.winehq.org/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine

How To Install Wine On Ubuntu?

What Is Wine?