The standard Wine distribution includes quite a few different executables, libraries, and configuration files. All of these must be set up properly for Wine to work well. This chapter will guide you through the necessary steps to get Wine installed on your system.
If you are running a distribution of Linux that uses packages to keep track of installed software, you should be in luck: A prepackaged version of Wine should already exist for your system. The following sections will tell you how to find the latest Wine packages and get them installed. You should be careful, though, about mixing packages between different distributions, and even from different versions of the same distribution. Often a package will only work on the distribution it's compiled for. We'll cover Debian, Red Hat, and other distributions.
If you're not lucky enough to have a package available for your operating system, or if you'd prefer a newer version of Wine than already exists as a package, you will have to download the Wine source code and compile it yourself on your own machine. Don't worry, it's not too hard to do this, especially with the many helpful tools that come with Wine. You don't need any programming experience to compile and install Wine, although it might be nice to have some minor UNIX administrative skills. Working from the source is covered in the Wine Developer's Guide.