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 These can, however, sometimes be out of date, depending on the distribution.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.gz 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 CVS server. Instructions for downloading from the Wine cvs repository are available at http://www.winehq.org/site/cvs . Please take note that the usual warnings for using a developmental version still apply. The source code on the CVS server 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 CVS 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 guide to helping applications work. Installing a package on a fresh system is remarkably straightforward. Simply download and install the package using whatever utility your distribution provides. There is usually no need to explicitly remove old packages before installing, as modern Linux distributions should upgrade and replace them automatically. If you installed Wine from source code, however, you should remove it before installing a Wine package. See the section on uninstalling Wine from source for proper instructions. Wine works on a huge amount of different Linux distributions, as well other Unix-like systems such as Solaris and FreeBSD, each with their own specific way of installing and managing packages. Fortunately, however, the same general ideas apply to all of them, and installing Wine should be no more difficult than installing any other software, no matter what distribution you use. Uninstalling Wine packages is simple as well, and in modern Linux distributions is usually done through the same easy interface as package installation. We won't cover the specifics of installing or uninstalling Wine packages among the various systems' methods of packaging and package management in this guide, however, up to date installation notes for particular distributions can be found at the WineHQ website in the HowTo. If you need further help figuring out how to simply install a Wine package, we suggest consulting your distribution's documentation, support forums, or IRC channels. Before installing Wine from source, make sure you uninstall any Wine binary packages you may have on your system. Installing from source requires use of the terminal window as well as a full copy of the Wine source code. Once having downloaded the source from CVS or extracted it from an archive, navigate to it using the terminal and then follow the remaining steps. Wine makes use of many open source libraries during its operation. While Wine is not strictly dependent on these libraries and will compile without most of them, much of Wine's functionality is improved by having them available at compile time. In the past, many user problems were caused by people not having the necessary development libraries when they built Wine from source; because of this reason and others, we highly recommend installing via binary packages or by building source packages which can automatically satisfy their build dependencies. If you wish to install build dependencies by hand, there are several ways to see if you're missing some useful development libraries. The most straightforward approach is to watch the configure program's output before you compile Wine and see if anything important is missing; if it is, simply install what's missing and rerun configure before compiling. You can also check the file configure generates, (include/config.h.in) and see if what files configure is looking for but not finding. Once you've installed the build dependencies you need, you're ready to compile the package. In the terminal window, after having navigated to the Wine source tree, run the following commands: $ ./configure # make depend # make # make install The last command requires root privileges. Although you should never run Wine as root, you will need to install it this way. To uninstall Wine from source, once again navigate to the same source folder that you used to install Wine using the terminal. Then, run the following command: # make uninstall This command will require root privileges, and should remove all of the Wine binary files from your system. It will not, however, remove your Wine configuration and applications located in your user's home directory, so you are free to install another version of Wine or delete that configuration by hand.