Wine 5.0 landed with more improvements to run the Windows applications in Linux.
Wine is open-source software designed to run Microsoft Windows applications in a Linux environment. Wine comes with a library Winelib which helps developers to compile their application to run Unix like systems.
Wine (i.e “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.
This popular Wine project released the latest major milestone release 5.0 with improvements and bug fixes. This release brings – built-in modules for portable executable (PE) formats, multi-monitor support, a reimplementation of XAudio2 and Vulkan 1.1 support.
Read the entire release notes here – Wine 5.0 release notes.
How to Install
Wine installation at the moment in Ubuntu, Linux Mint (prior to 19.10 release) is a bit tricky due to the recent key changes and the unavailability of the DirectX support audio package libfaudio0 in Ubuntu official repos. However, you can still install using the below instructions.
Open the terminal and run below commands sequentially to install Wine 5.0 in Ubuntu-based derivatives or in Linux Mint.
First, remove the Wine if installed in your system via below command:
sudo apt remove winehq-stable wine-stable
1. Add the key to WineHQ.
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key && sudo apt-key add winehq.key
2. Add the official repo for your distribution. If you are using Ubuntu 19.10, replace bionic to eoan. For the same for Linux Mint 19.x series as well.
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'
3. Now, to install the dependent packages including libfaudio0, add below repository which is prepared to ease the installation. Follow this step only for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Linux Mint 18.x series.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cybermax-dexter/sdl2-backport
sudo apt update
4. Now, install the packages from the stable branch of Wine.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable
After installation, to configure Wine – run winecfg from terminal to check the version.
Other Distributions
Visit the download page for Wine 5.0 binaries for Fedora, Slackware, macOS, FreeBSD, SUSE.
To remove the Wine, Open Software & Updates and navigate to Other Software tab. Then remove the PPA, and Wine apt repository lines.
Via WineHQ.
