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. 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. Red Hat/RPM users can use rpmfind.net to track down available Wine RPM binaries. This page contains a list of all rpmfind packages that start with the letter "W", including a few Wine packages. Of course now that you have the RPM package, you may be wondering "What in the world do I do with this thing?". The easiest way to install an RPM is to make sure that you have not previously installed wine (perhaps, when you installed linux) and then switch to the directory you downloaded the rpm file to. Once there, type this one command as root: # rpm -ivh wine-20020605-2.i386.rpm You may also want to install the wine-devel package. The first place you should look if your system isn't Debian or Red Hat is the WineHQ Download Page. This page lists many assorted archives of binary (precompiled) Wine files. Lycos FTPSearch is another useful resource for tracking down miscellaneous distribution packages. NOTE: If you are running a Mandrake system, please see the page on how to get wine for a Redhat system, as Mandrake is based on Redhat.