Once you've decided that Wine is right for your needs, the next step is
to decide how you want to install it. There are three methods for
installing Wine from WineHQ, each with their own advantages and
disadvantages.
By far the easiest method for installing Wine is to use a prepackaged
version of Wine. These packages contain ready-to-run Wine binary
files specifically compiled for your distribution, and they are
tested regularly by the packagers for both functionality and
completeness.
Packages are the recommended method for installing Wine. We make
them easily available at the
WineHQ downloads page
, and these are always the latest packages available. Being
popular, Wine packages can also be found elsewhere in official
distribution repositories. These can, however, sometimes be out of
date, depending on the distribution. Packages are easily upgradable
as well, and many distributions can upgrade Wine seamlessly with a
few clicks. Building your own installable binary package from a
source package is also possible, although it is beyond the scope of
this guide.
Sometimes the Wine packages don't fit your needs exactly. Perhaps
they're not available for your architecture or distribution, or
perhaps you want to build wine using your own compiler optimizations
or with some options disabled, or perhaps you need to modify a
specific part of the source code before compilation. Being an open
source project, you are free to do all of these things with Wine's
source code, which is provided with every Wine release. This method
of installation can be done by downloading a Wine source archive and
compiling from the command line. If you are comfortable with such
things and have special needs, this option may be for you.
Getting Wine source archives is simple. Every release, we put a
source package in compressed tar.bz2 format at the
WineHQ downloads
page. Compiling and installing Wine from source is slightly
more difficult than using a package, however we will cover it in
depth and attempt to hold your hand along the way.
If you wish to try out the bleeding edge of Wine development, or
would even like to help develop Wine yourself, you can download the
very latest source code from our Git repository. Instructions for
downloading from the Wine Git repository are available at http://www.winehq.org/site/git
.
Please take note that the usual warnings for using a developmental
version still apply. The source code on the Git repository is largely
untested and may not even compile properly. It is, however, the
best way to test out how Wine will work in the next version, and if
you're modifying source code it's best to get the latest copy. The
Git repository is also useful for application maintainers interested
in testing if an application will still work right for the next
release, or if a recent patch actually improves things. If you're
interested in helping us to get an application working in Wine, see
the HowTo.
