How to Install Wine in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04?

Wine is a very powerful + a popular software emulator for GNU/Linux that basically lets you run your MS Windows applications in GNU/Linux. Although we do have paid tools such as CrossOver for instance but Wine is a completely free, opensource application which supports a huge list of programs that are designed to run in MS Windows platform.

This can be a very handy utility because say that you switched to GNU/Linux from MS Windows recently and wanting to run the MS office productivity suite in GNU/Linux, then Wine will most probably be able to "rescue" you :). Although I said it's an emulator but Wine is a bit different kind of emulator according to their FAQ page because unlike many other apps, it does not perform any CPU (virtual machines API such as Virtualbox for instance) emulation which results in a performance penalty since a CPU simulation is one of the most complicated process of a software emulator. So it does not create a full virtual environment but act as an app that emulates a compatibility layer in other words.

Therefore not only we can MS Windows apps with Wine but sometimes it can run the same application with even better efficiency than in MS Windows too!. In the past there was only 32-bit support but now Wine also supports 64-bit CPU instructions as well.

"I love MS Windo$#, Shi*... I'm wasted :/..."

It also supports Directx 9.0c at this time which has been there for a while now to be honest, although the 10 and 11 aren't supported yet but it runs a lot of Games in GNU/Linux just fine. But remember, it cannot run all the applications but supports a big list of apps nonetheless (which is growing with each release of course).

You can install Wine for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the two methods. You can either choose to install the official stable version or the latest but unstable (beta) version which gives you a little taste of the latest features.

You can install Wine 1.2 stable version (the version number may change according to the updated stable release, you can always find the current Stable version from this WineHQ page and then check whether it's available in the official PPA page and then replace the "1.2" as appropriate) by using the below commands in your Terminal window.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wine1.2

If you want to install the Wine 1.3 beta (development) release in Ubuntu Linux, then use the below command instead of the above one.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wine1.3

Once installed, whenever you want to run a ".exe" file in Ubuntu, just right-click on it and you'll see a new menu called "Wine Windows Program Loader" ... you know how to do the rest :D. 

Yep... that should do it. Come on! lets get drunk! and do something weird ;-).