Wine, a most popular and powerful open source application for Linux, that used to run Windows based applications and games on Linux Platform without any trouble.

WineHQ team, recently announced a new development version of Wine 4.8 (release candidate for the upcoming Wine 5.0). This new development build arrives with a number of new important features and 44 bug fixes.

Wine team, keep releasing their development builds almost on weekly basis and adding numerous new features and fixes. Each new version brings support for new applications and games, making Wine a most popular and must have tool for every user, who want to run Windows based software in a Linux platform.

According to the changelog, following key features are added in this release:

Support building most programs in PE format. Unicode data updated to Unicode 12.0. Joystick support improvements. Default to non-PIC builds on i386. Various bug fixes.

For more in-depth details about this build can be found at the official changelog page.

This article guides you how to install most recent development version of Wine 4.8 on Red Hat and Debian based systems such as CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other supported distributions.

Installing Wine 4.8 on Linux

Unfortunately, there are no official Wine repository available for the Red Hat based systems and the only way to install Wine, is to compile it from source.

To do this, you need to install some dependency packages such as gcc, flex, bison, libX11-devel, freetype-devel and Development Tools, etc. These packages are must required to compile Wine from source.

Install Wine on RedHat, Fedora and CentOS

Let’s install them using following YUM command on the respective distributions.

# yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools' # yum -y install flex bison libX11-devel freetype-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel prelink libjpeg-devel libpng-devel

Next, switch to normal user (here my username is ‘tecmint‘) and download the latest development version of Wine (i.e. 4.8) and extract the source tallball package using the following commands.

# su tecmint $ cd /tmp $ wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/4.x/wine-4.8.tar.xz $ tar -xvf wine-4.8.tar.xz -C /tmp/

Now, it’s time to compile and build Wine installer using the following commands as normal user on respective Linux architectures. If you don’t know your Linux distribution architecture, you can read this article to find out that your Linux System is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Note: The installation process might take up-to 15-20 minutes depending upon your internet and hardware speed, during installation it will ask you to enter root password.

On 32-Bit Systems

$ cd wine-4.8/ $ ./configure $ make # make install [Run as root User]

On 64-Bit Systems

$ cd wine-4.8/ $ ./configure --enable-win64 $ make # make install [Run as root User]

Install Wine on Fedora

On Fedora, you can use official Wine repository to install wine packages as shown:

----------- On Fedora 30 ----------- # dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/30/winehq.repo # dnf install winehq-devel [Development branch] # dnf install winehq-stable [Stable branch]

----------- On Fedora 29 ----------- # dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/29/winehq.repo # dnf install winehq-devel [Development branch] # dnf install winehq-stable [Stable branch]

Install Wine On Ubuntu and Linux Mint

Under Ubuntu and Linux Mint based systems, you can easily install the latest development build of Wine using the official PPA.

Open a terminal and run the following commands with sudo privileges to download and add the new key.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 [Enable 32-bit Arch] $ wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key $ sudo apt-key add winehq.key

Now install Wine on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

----------------- On Ubuntu 19.04 ----------------- $ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ disco main' $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel [Development branch] $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable [Stable branch] ----------------- On Ubuntu 18.10 ----------------- $ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ cosmic main' $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel [Development branch] $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable [Stable branch] ----------------- Ubuntu 18.04 & Linux Mint 19.x ----------------- $ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main' $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel [Development branch] $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable [Stable branch] ----------------- Ubuntu 16.04 & Linux Mint 18.x ----------------- $ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ xenial main' $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel [Development branch] $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable [Stable branch]

Install Wine On Debian Systems

On Debian systems, you should follow below instructions to install latest WineHQ development builds.

First, enable 32-bit packages, then download and install key which is used to sign packages.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 [Only on 64-bit systems] $ wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key $ sudo apt-key add winehq.key

Next, add the following repository to /etc/apt/sources.list file as per your Debian version.

----------------- Debian 8 (Jessie) ----------------- deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ jessie main ----------------- Debian 9 (Stretch) ----------------- deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ stretch main ----------------- Debian 10 (currently Testing) (Buster) ----------------- deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ buster main

Now update the package repository database and install WineH! development branch as shown.

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel [Development branch] $ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable [Stable branch]

For other Linux distributions, the installation instructions can be found at https://www.winehq.org/download.

How to Use Wine to Start Windows Applications

Once the installation completes successfully, you can install or run any windows based applications or games using wine as shown below.

On 32-Bit Systems

$ wine notepad $ wine notepad.exe $ wine c:\windows

otepad.exe

On 64-Bit Systems

$ wine64 notepad $ wine64 notepad.exe $ wine64 c:\windows

otepad.exe

Note: Please remember, this is a development build and cannot be installed or used on production systems. It is advised to use this version only for testing purpose.

If you’re looking for a most recent stable version of Wine, you can go through our following articles, that describes how to install most stable latest version on almost all Linux environments.