May 26, 2023
Tested on Deepin 20.9.
These instructions install Wine Stable 7.0 and Wine Development 7.17, not the current versions of Wine, which are 8.0 and 8.9. This is because Deepin 20.9 is based on Debian 10 Buster, which is currently Oldstable and not receiving updates other than for security.
Verify 64-bit architecture. The following command should respond with "amd64".
$ dpkg --print-architecture
See if 32-bit architecture is already installed. The following command should respond with "i386"
$ dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
If it does not display "i386", execute the following.
$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Re-check with
$ dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
$ sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
$ sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
$ sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/dists/oldstable/winehq-buster.sources
$ sudo apt update
The next command installs Wine Stable. To install Wine Development or Wine Staging, replace winehq-stable by winehq-devel or winehq-staging
After a major Wine upgrade (from Wine 6 to Wine 7, for example), Wine Stable may temporarily be unavailable, but Wine Development and Wine Staging can still be installed.
$ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable
$ wine --version
The default Wine configuration prepares Wine as a Windows 7 environment, which is good for some older Windows apps, but many contemporary apps will be better matched to Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. In addition, other configuration options may be significant.
To bring up Wine's configuration panel, open a Terminal window and execute winecfg. If installing mono or gecko is offered, accept the offer. When prompted, set your preferred version of Windows.
$ wine winecfg
If you are creating custom Wine prefixes, this configuration must be repeated for each prefix.
Just for fun, or to see Wine in action …
$ wine clock
If installing gecko is offered, accept the offer.
$ wine iexplore
Wine is a Terminal application. Even after installing Wine, you will not find it listed with the desktop apps that came with your Linux distribution. Wine is invoked using Terminal commands.
As an example of installing a Windows app with Wine, consider Abcdef, a fictitious Windows application which is installed by Abcdef_Setup.exe. To install your own Windows app, replace Abcdef_Setup.exe with the filename of your app's installer.
The first step is to download Abcdef_Setup.exe and store it in ~/Downloads.
After doing that, execute winecfg (if you haven't already).
$ wine winecfg
The command to execute Abcdef_Setup.exe must be issued from the directory where Abcdef_Setup.exe is located, so execute
$ cd ~/Downloads
The next command starts the installation. Respond to the installer's prompts just as you would in Windows.
$ wine Abcdef_Setup.exe
Here is a real example. It installs version 8.6 of the text editor Notepad++. The file name of the Notepad++ installation program is npp.8.6.Installer.x64.exe
$ wine npp.8.6.Installer.x64.exe
When installation is complete, look for an Abcdef launcher on your desktop. There may also be an entry named Wine in your distribution's Applications. Launchers may require you to confirm execution of your app is safe.
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