Table of Contents

  1. Pre setup for 32 bit mode
  2. Prefix info
    1. Steps to create new prefix with windows environments
      1. 1. Set this environment variable or add as an alias. run this command in your shell
      2. 2. You can add an export to your environment ( i.e bash , zsh etc ) to point to wine environment to make it easy to switch between prefixes
  3. Setup 32-bit prefix
    1. CLI:
  4. Setup 64+32 bit prefix
  5. Issues
  6. Run wine with debug output limited to errors

Pre setup for 32 bit mode

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine wine32 wine64 libwine libwine:i386 fonts-wine

WineHQ Staging( Debian ):

sudo apt install wget software-properties-common
sudo wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key -O /usr/share/keyrings/winehq-archive.key
sudo wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/dists/bookworm/winehq-bookworm.sources -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.sources
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable  # or winehq-staging

RHEL:

sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install wine wine-alsa wine-core wine-capi wine-fonts wine-libs wine-tools wine-mono wine-gecko
sudo dnf install glibc.i686 libgcc.i686 libX11.i686 freetype.i686

Arch:

In /etc/pacman.conf uncomment the following lines:

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Install:

sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -S wine wine-mono wine-gecko lib32-mesa lib32-libpulse lib32-alsa-lib lib32-freetype2 lib32-glibc

See next section for creating a 32-bit prefix.

Prefix info

  • A wine prefix is a environment variable which contains a path to a directory which stores the isolated windows environment.

  • AKA all the files like dosdevices and the imitation windows C drive directory structure.

  • This allows you to configure indpendent environments for different windows applications

  • I’ve created a directory in /home/buhfur/wine-prefixes that acts as the main folder for storing different wine environments

Steps to create new prefix with windows environments

For this example we’re going to be using the /home/buhfur/wine-prefixes/minesweeper folder.

1. Set this environment variable or add as an alias. run this command in your shell 

# Run this in a shell to temporarily set the wineprefix the specified directory 
# Any further commands or apps run with wine will use this prefix 
export WINEPREFIX="/home/buhfur/wine-prefixes/minesweeper" 

# Then run the command below , this initiates the prefix and creates the directory structure 
wineboot -u

2. You can add an export to your environment ( i.e bash , zsh etc ) to point to wine environment to make it easy to switch between prefixes 

# in my ~/.bashrc , points to prefix I have for a specific app 
export MYPREFIX="$HOME/wine-prefixes/myprefix"

# Then after you set that you can change your prefix by adding an alias or manually 
alias myprefix="WINEPREFIX=$MYPREFIX"

Setup 32-bit prefix

There are multiple ways to do this , you can create a prefix on the CLI or add it to your bashrc to make default

CLI: 

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/wine32prefix winecfg

To use this prefix:

WINEPREFIX=~/wine32prefix wine your_app.exe

To make prefix default, add this in bashrc:

export WINEPREFIX=~/wine32prefix
export WINEARCH=win32

Check prefix for 32-bit:

file "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/explorer.exe"

Setup 64+32 bit prefix 

WINEPREFIX=~/wineprefix winecfg

Issues

Anytime you encounter errors , it’s usually a good idea to delete the ~/.wine cache

rm -rf ~/.wine

Run wine with debug output limited to errors 

WINEDEBUG=-all wine your_app.exe