Wine is an open source application that can be installed within a Linux operating system to allow Linux users to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows. Additional information can be found in the Wine Wikipedia article and the Wine HQ web site. The main scope of this article is focused on installing Wine on the Eee.

Now that Debian has moved on to Lenny, wine is not specifically compiled in etch via the main wine repositories. So wine builds for the Eee have to be individually compiled, as the Eee's xandros is based on Debian etch. The last stable compile of wine 1.0 for the Eeepc is available from the xepc.org repositories. This should be the preferred version to install, and will work well with most programs. The last official winehq debian etch compile was 1.1.15, which was a beta release. It has been tested on the Eee, and works with no known issues. The latest available release is 1.1.29, which was made specifically for the Eee. 1.1.21 has been available for some time, and again works well with no known issues, as well as many advantages over the last stable release.

Best advice for installing wine on the Eee comes from winehq: start with the stable version of Wine available for your distro and see if that works with the apps you want to use. If it does, fine. If it doesn't, upgrade. In most cases the upgrade should be to the latest development version, however, it is a good idea to check Bugzilla and the AppDB for any known regressions. If there are any, upgrade to the most recent version known to work for your app.

The main sources for installing wine currently are:

1. xepc (stable v1.0) http://www.xepc.org/en/
2. budgetdedicated (stable 1.1.1) http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html
3. lamaresh (beta 1.1.13-15) http://www.lamaresh.net/binary.php
4. BL00's latest eee releases from mediafire, (beta currently 1.1.29) http://www.mediafire.com/file/hggmmmn053u/wine_1.1.29-1_i386.deb, 1.1.21 has proven very stable http://www.mediafire.com/file/mmgckg4q3wo/wine_1.1.21-1_i386.deb

Older versions of wine are available from the xnv4xandros, and debian etch repositories.

Wine can be installed by adding the relevant repository to the sources.list, or synaptic GUI. Both methods acheive the same results, the former by use of the terminal, and the latter by the use of the graphical interface of synaptic. The relevant DEB files can be downloaded directly, and installed locally.

The last stable wine version specially compiled for the EeePC is wine 1.0.0-1+eeepc2 from http://updates.xepc.org/. This is an up-to-date stable version of wine 1.0 and should suit most purposes. To add this repository,

1) Open a terminal window

2) Edit /etc/apt/sources.list with the default text editor:

sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list

Add this line:

deb http://updates.xepc.org/ p701 main dev

3) Download and install the public key for xepc.org:

wget http://updates.xepc.org/dists/p701/xepc-pubkey.txt 
sudo apt-key add xepc-pubkey.txt

4) Update the package list for apt:

sudo apt-get update

5) Now you can install wine with this command:

sudo apt-get install wine cabextract

(cabextract helps to unpack windows runtimes etc)

1. Open Terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T)

2. Enter sudo synaptic

3. From the menu choose Settings, Repositories. The repositories shown should resemble the picture below, though they might be specific to your model.

4. While looking at the repositories, click New and enter the following values into the respective fields:

To install the xepc.org latest version instead, enter the following values:

URI: http://updates.xepc.org/

Distribution: p701

Sections(s): main

NB: Make sure the selection box shows Binary (deb) as shown below. Then click “OK” to save the new repository. It will then be listed in addition to your current repos, similar to the picture above.

5. Follow the instructions in the Information popup: Click Close to close the popup and then click Reload.

6. Wait a few minutes while Synaptic downloads the package information. You should see a progress indicator as shown below.

7. In the list of packages on the right, find “wine” either by scrolling through the list or typing the first few letters. There should be two relevant packages (“wine” and “libwine”)

8. Check the selection box to pick “wine” and then choose the Mark for Installation button on the popup dialog that appears. synaptic will let you know if other packages need to be installed too.

9. Click the Apply button in the synaptic toolbar to install your packages. Then click the Apply button on the subsequent dialog box. (Verify first that your package is listed in the “To be installed” list).

10. Synaptic will now display a progress indicator while it downloads your packages.

11. Next Synaptic will display a progress indicator while it installs the new packages.

12. Finally, Synaptic will tell you it is finished installing the packages. You may review the log for errors, if you wish. Anything reported there currently resides outside the scope of this article.

13. Some people prefer to restore the state of Synaptic to what it was before you added the extra repository in step 4. From the menu choose Settings, Repositories, and disable the extra xepc repository by using the check box next to it. (You could also delete the repository altogether, but simply disabling it makes it easier to use again in the future). Then repeat step 5 so that Synaptic rebuilds its lists based on the reduced set of repositories.

Download a wine DEB file, and install it locally.

1. Paste one of the following addresses in your browser

   http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html (the last section Debian Etch 4.0)
   http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/pool/main/w/wine/ (wine_1.1.1~winehq0~debian~4.0-1_i386.deb)
   http://www.lamaresh.net/binary.php (any etch version)
   http://updates.xepc.org/pool-main/w/wine/

2. Right click the deb file and save the file
3. Navigate to the downloaded file, right click it and choose 'Install DEB file'

Forum member BL00 has compiled the latest wine version 1.1.29 for the EeePC from source. You can simply download the deb package wine_1.1.29-1_i386.deb hosted by mediafire.com, and install by right-clicking and choose “Install DEB file”. This is an all-in-one package.

Whilst not strictly necessary, remove any previous wine installs by issuing these commands:

sudo apt-get remove wine libwine
sudo dpkg --purge wine libwine

Although this is a development release, it runs many programs (including Photoshop Elements) that have previously had issues in other versions of wine. So worth a try if you can't get your Windows application running with the stable version of wine. 1.1.29 was released 07/05/10, so is not fully tested on the Eee yet, whereas 1.1.21 has been available since 2009 with no known issues.

Source of information from this thread: Compile wine 1.1.21 from source

After a successful install of WINE, simply running the program at the command line with no arguments (ie, just type wine and press enter) will bring up a GUI allowing the user the option of configuring wine.

* for 0.9.49 version onwards, configuration window is called by winecfg.

^{(Instructions are forthcoming - help with this section is welcome).}

In the simplest sense, once wine is installed if you are running a program which will run under wine, you just run it.

So, if for example, you downloaded the setup.exe for Ocean from bahai-education.org, you could just go to a console, cd to the directory you downloaded the setup file to and type

wine ./setup.exe 

and it would bring up wine and just run it.

When wine installs, it sets up a “virtual drive c” in a folder in your home directory… /home/user/.wine/drive_c and your programs will be installed there, so when I made a menu shortcut to Ocean.exe I said:

wine /home/user/.wine/drive_c/ocean/Ocean.exe 

and it just runs. If there are compatibility problems past that, you get to dig into the wine documentation for help. Many many windows programs tho, “just run.”

Note: It is always better to use DOS or Windows style path than the Unix style to run wine. e.g.

wine 'C:\Games\Tron\tron.exe'

Some Windows program just don't run with the Unix path. So, if you put your Windows program in a SD, then it is always easier to assign a drive letter, say D:\ to your SD with winecfg.

Another way to run it:

Install the rox-filer from debian repositories, you can then in the file Manager (not Xandros), right click on the exe, and set run action … to wine,this need to be done one time only, then you can double click on any exe file to run it. (saving you the ssd spaces to house the file.)

Yet another easier way to run wine:

Run the wine File Manager by typing winefile in a console. This will bring a File Manager that looks like the Windows Explorer. Then you can navigate to the directory that contains your Windows program and double click on the exe file to launch the Windows program. This method also avoids many error you may encounter with strange folder name (e.g. “D:\ ”) that Windows (I mean wine) found it difficult to understand.

Wine will run many Windows programs out of the box, but some may need additional tweaks. For example, a certain program ABC may need a specific version of Windows library foo.ocx or foo.dll in C:\Windows\system32\. If you run this program on the command line with Wine, you will be able to see a missing library error message: library foo.dll is missing.

To overcome this error, you can simply copy the missing library from the Windows box on your desktop to the corresponding location in ~/.wine/drive_c/, then run the wine registry in a console to register the library:

 wine regsvr32 foo.dll

and for unregistering:

 wine  regsvr32 /u foo.dll

To have some idea what programs will run under wine and how to do it (in case of trouble), you can visit Wine AppDB at http://appdb.winehq.org/.

To make life easier for end-users like us, WineHQ has provided a script called winetricks that helps to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries sometimes needed to run programs in Wine. To download,

 wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

and to run it, e.g.

 sh winetricks vb6run

This will install the Visual Basic 6 runtime package to wine.

To have some idea what packages are available, visit http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks.