In most cases on a Debian system, you can install Wine with a single command, as root:
# apt-get install wine |
apt-get will connect to a Debian archive across the Internet (thus, you must be online), then download the Wine package and install it on your system. End of story.
Of course, Debian's pre-packaged version of Wine may not be the most recent release. If you are running the stable version of Debian, you may be able to get a slightly newer version of Wine by grabbing the package from the unstable distribution, although this may be a little risky, depending on how far the unstable distribution has diverged from the stable one. You can find a list of Wine binary packages for the various Debian releases using the package search engine at www.debian.org.
To install a package that's not part of your distribution, you must use dpkg instead of apt-get. Since dpkg doesn't download the file for you, you must do it yourself. Follow the link on the package search engine to the desired package, then click on the Go To Download Page button and follow the instructions. Save the file to your hard drive, then run dpkg on it. For example, if you saved the file to your home directory, you might perform the following actions to install it:
$ su - Password: # cd /home/user # dpkg -i wine_0.0.20021031-1.deb |
You may also want to install the wine-doc package, and if you are using Wine from the 2.3 distribution (Woody), the wine-utils package as well.