How to Install Wine 1.8 on Ubuntu 16.04 via PPA

Wine is a recursive acronym for Wine is not an emulator. Wine is a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows programs natively on Linux. It’s free open source and easy to use. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Wine 1.8.2 (the latest stable version) on Ubuntu 16.04.

Install Wine 1.8 on Ubuntu 16.04

Open a terminal window and run this following 3 commands one by one.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wine1.8 winetricks wine-gecko2.21 wine-mono0.0.8

You will be asked to agree to the Microsoft end-user license agreement in the installation process because it will install some Microsoft TrueType core fonts.

Winecfg

Before we install any Windows program using Wine, it’s a good practice to run the following command in terminal.

winecfg

The winecfg tool will create a .wine directory under your home directory and in the .wine directory there will be a sub-directory called drive_c, aka the virtual C disk. All Windows programs will be installed in drive_c. There are also some .reg file under .wine directory. They are registry files. The .wine directory is commonly called wine prefix or wine bottle.

The winecfg tool will also create a virtual Z drive. Run the following command.

ls -la .wine/dosdevices

Output:

total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 linuxbabe linuxbabe 4096 5月  16 18:58 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 linuxbabe linuxbabe 4096 5月  16 18:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 linuxbabe linuxbabe   10 5月  16 18:58 c: -> ../drive_c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 linuxbabe linuxbabe    1 5月  16 18:58 z: -> /

As can be seen from the output, the virtual C drive is located at ~/.wine/drive_c and virtual Z drive is pointed to the Linux root partition.

Note that Wine is not a sandbox application. Programs installed using Wine has the same privileges as the user running it. So don’t ever run wine as root user.

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