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Feb 2013 Update: More recent versions of Wine are now available in the standard LMDE repositories, so skip all the headache below and just install Wine with a s swift sudo apt-get install wine and you’re done!

The Wine “not-emulator” allows you to run Windows software under Linux, but the version in the Debian testing repos (themselves cutting edge) is pretty old, at time of writing it’s a 1.3.6 variant, while Wine 1.5.0+ is now available. Unfortunately, upgrading can be a bit of a pig if you want to build Wine yourself, so a far better solution is to find some Debian binaries and install them. So let’s do that…

Getting the Debian binaries

Wine binaries are available for a whole heap of different platforms, distros and architectures from http://www.winehq.org/download/, but in this case I’m installing on Debian, so if you are too, head on over to http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/ and grab the following packages (either 32 or 64 bit, depending on your architecture – I’m using 64-bit LMDE so I’ll use the 64-bit package names for this quick guide):

• libwine-alsa-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-bin-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-capi-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-cms-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-dbg-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-dev-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-gl-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-gphoto2-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-ldap-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-openal-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-oss-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-print-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-sane-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• libwine-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• wine-bin-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb
• wine-unstable_1.5.0-0.2_amd64.deb

Satisfying Dependencies

jp helpfully provided details that for the above packages to install without issue, you’ll first need to install the packages:

• libc6-i386
• lib32asound2
• libc6-dev-i386

So do that via your mechanism of choice, for example, if you use apt-get then you can install them though a simple:

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 lib32asound2 libc6-dev-i386

Replacing Wine

Before you can install any new Wine stuff, you’ll first have to uninstall the wine package. Do that through whatever means you feel most comfortable with, ya know, synaptic, apt, dpkg etc.

Once that’s done, you’ll want to install all the libwine packages through dpkg (to be honest, you might not need them all – but it doesn’t hurt, and you’ll certainly need most of them).

To install all the libs, open up the location you saved all the .deb files to in the console, and run:

sudo dpkg -i libwine*

Once that’s completed successfully, in the same location run:

sudo dpkg -i wine-bin*

And finally, in the same location again, run:

sudo dpkg -i wine-unstable*

Almost done!

Getting the gecko engine

At this point we’re 99% complete, we just need to launch winecfg and let it install the Gecko engine for web-browser shenanigans (again, you might not need this – but there’s no harm in it, and Wine’ll moan at you about it if you don’t). So just run:

winecfg

And when it prompts you about gecko, just click on [Install].

Ta-da!

New cutting-edge Wine goodness is now yours to play with, although from this point on you won’t get automatically updated as wine won’t be installed from any repository. For this reason, it’s worth holding onto all the debs so you can uninstall them with ease via a swift sudo dpkg -P *.deb (-P for purge) if at a later date you want to go back to the repo version.

As Bryant would say – Drink some for me, eh, pal?