Installing Wine 5.0 in Ubuntu

Before we dive into the commands for installing Wine, let’s first talk about what Wine is in General in the Linux World.

As described in Wine’s Site:
Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.

In short, it allows you to run Win32.exe Applications built for Windows System on Linux.

Let’s look at the steps required for installing Wine 5.0 on a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system using the apt-get package manager

1. Setup PPA

If this is a 64-bit system , then we need to enable the 32-bit architecture. Once done, then install the key used to sign the wine package

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
$ wget -qO - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo apt-key add -

2. Enable the Wine Apt repository

$ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main' 
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cybermax-dexter/sdl2-backport

3. Install Wine on Ubuntu

Time to install Wine packages from the apt repository.
The –install-recommends option will install all the recommended packages by winehq stable versions on your Ubuntu system. 

$ sudo apt update 
$ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

In case the install fails due to some unforeseen circumstances, you can try and install the same using aptitude.

$ sudo apt install aptitude 
$ sudo aptitude install winehq-stable

4. Check Wine version

You can check the wine version installed by running the below command:

$ wine --version 

wine-5.0

Hope this helps.

Happy Coding!

Anubhav Ranjan
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