How to Install and Use Wine on Ubuntu 18.04

Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. Wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It is an interface that translates Windows system calls into equivalent POSIX calls used by Linux and other Unix-based operating systems.

Wine isn’t always the best option to run Windows programs on Linux. Not all Windows applications will run in Wine, even if they do, they may not behave in the same way that they normally would. The Wine AppDB database contains a list of applications that have been tested and confirmed to work under Wine.

You can also use a virtualization tool like VirtualBox or VMware , but they require more system resources and a Windows installation.

This tutorial explains how to install Wine on Ubuntu 18.04. We will show you how to install the distro stable version 3.0 and the latest version of Wine 5.0. The same instructions apply for Ubuntu 16.04 and any Ubuntu-based distribution, including Linux Mint and Elementary OS.

Prerequisites

To be able to install new packages on your Ubuntu system, you must be logged in as a user with sudo privileges .

Installing Wine 3.0 on Ubuntu

The Wine packages are included in the default Ubuntu repositories can be easily installed with the apt package manager. This is the easiest way to install Wine on Ubuntu. However, the version included in the repositories may lag behind the latest version of Wine.

If you are running a 64-bit Ubuntu system, you should enable multiarch, which allows you to install both 64 and 32-bit packages on the same machine. This is needed because most of the Windows applications are 32-bit.

Start by enabling the 32-bit architecture and updating the packages list:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386sudo apt update

Install Wine by typing the following command:

sudo apt install wine64 wine32

Once the installation is complete use the wine --version command to print the Wine version:

wine --version

At the time of writing this article, the current version of Wine available in the Ubuntu 18.04 repositories is 3.0.

wine-3.0 (Ubuntu 3.0-1ubuntu1)

That’s it. Wine 3.0 has been installed on your Ubuntu machine.