Getting started with Wine

Ubuntu offers a huge range of software from the repositories that cover all kinds of needs. For any one piece of software you can name that you use in Windows, there's a pretty good chance that something else exists in Linux that can do the same job, often for free. OK, some of them may not be as well known as their Windows counterparts, and they may require a little adjustment, but this is fairly trivial. For most people, Ubuntu can do everything they use Windows for.

But what if you absolutely need to use a specific application? Or you have other software that you bought for Windows and would like to be able to run? Or even those games you may still have?

Well, the answer is Wine. It stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Essentially, it allows you to run many Windows programs on Linux. Wine recently released a stable 1.0 version after 15 years in development, and although it's by no means perfect, you may be surprised at just how good it is. I have successfully run two of my favourite games on it (Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the second of which doesn't seem to work in Vista!), and many other games are well supported and will work straight away. For some others, you can get them running with a little work - the website features a search engine so you can check the compatibility of something before you try it. If you have some Windows games you haven't been able to run, why not dig them out and give them a try?

Wine is in the Ubuntu repository, but unless you're already running the next version, Intrepid Ibex, this version may not be very up to date. It's probably better to go with the official version.

To install the current version of Wine, you need to add another repository. Open a terminal and enter the following:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

This will download the APT key for the Wine repository. Now, to add the repository to you /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

This is the version for Hardy Heron. For Intrepid Ibex, you need to enter this instead:

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

Now to update it:

sudo apt-get update

And to install Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Now, Wine creates its own entry in your applications menu, as shown here on my Kubuntu Hardy system:


This is how it looks in Kubuntu with Tasty Menu, but any Ubuntu variant should show the same four items for a newly installed copy of Wine: Notepad, Uninstall, Browse C Drive and Configure Wine.

Wine works by creating a folder in your home directory called .wine. This is then set up to trick the applications into thinking they are running on Windows. Choosing the Browse C Drive option lets you open a folder inside .wine called drive_c, which emulates the C drive (the main hard drive) on a Windows install. This is where anything you install using Wine will reside.

Notepad is a clone of the Windows version, and Uninstall is essentially a copy of the Windows Add/Remove software dialogue. That leaves Configure Wine, which comes up with this:


This dialogue lets you configure Wine to help make things work. For instance, you can specify for it to emulate different versions of Windows - even to the point of being able to run one as XP, another as Vista, and a third as Windows 98, for example! This gives you huge scope to tinker and get software working.

For the most part, getting something working is easy. For a Windows EXE file, I find that whether you're using Gnome or KDE, you can just click on it as usual and it will run. You can also run it from the command line with something like this:

wine setup.exe

Other types of files are generally just as easy to run. If you have an application on a CD or DVD that you wish to install, it won't usually autorun the way it does in Windows, but instead you have to browse through the disc yourself and locate the appropriate file (which is usually setup.exe, autorun.exe, or something similar). Follow the installer's instructions as usual and it should install fine.

For more information about using Wine, I'd suggest going to their website and having a good look around. Nearly every piece of software you can think of has been tried with Wine, and they give ratings for how well it works in Wine, often including instructions.

Now, I won't claim that Wine is perfect. Not everything will work on it, and not everything that does work on it works well. But you may be surprised at how well it does do, and it's improving all the time. If there's one or two applications you use in Windows that are keeping you from making the switch to Ubuntu, why not try Wine to see if they will run?

Tar files

It's quite likely that if you've been using Linux for any great length of time, you'll have discovered tar files. If you go to a website and download something which is offered as the Linux version of an application, the chances are it will be a tar archive (although some offer separate RPM and deb packages for different distros). Tar files are widely used in Linux, as well as in other Unix-like operating systems.
So what are they? Well, if you've come from a Windows background, you should be familiar with .zip files. These don't usually contain an application, but instead contain a collection of files. The .zip format is simply a convenient way to store them as it rolls them into one file and compresses it, making it ideal for distributing these files across the Internet or storing them.
Well, tar files are Linux and Unix's equivalent. Tar stands for Tape Archive, and the term comes from backing up to a magnetic tape. Like .zip files, tar files are usually used as a convenient and easy way to store or distribute a collection of files. However, it's far more common for tar files to be used to distribute applications than it is for .zip files. If you download a non distro-specific Linux binary, that will usually be packaged as a tar file. Also, if you download source code for an application, you can generally expect it to be packaged as a tar file.
Although it's best to use a deb package in Ubuntu where possible, there are times when you can only get something as a tar package. So being able to deal with tar packages is a necessary Linux skill. In addition, they're ideal for backing up files in case something goes wrong.
Tar files aren't compressed by default. There are two utilities available to compress them: bzip2and gzip. Normally you'll be able to tell which one has been used from the file extensions used. This example is compressed using bzip2:

package.tar.bz2

While this is compressed using gzip

package.tar.gz

That's pretty simple to follow, but remember that unlike Windows, Linux doesn't rely on file extensions to ascertain what a file is in quite the same way, and someone can easily give a package a completely different extension. So you may see variations such as .tgz.

There are plenty of graphical applications available to deal with these packages, but as usual we're going to go the command-line route! For this example I'm going to use the Wordpress software, as this is available as a gzipped tar package, and is a mere 1MB in size.

Click on this link to download the current version of Wordpress. If the package winds up on your desktop, move it to your /home directory to make it more convenient to work with.

Now, to extract the contents of an uncompressed tar archive, you would enter the following:

tar -xf packagename.tar

The x tells tar that you want to extract the files, while the f indicates that the filename for the package follows.

But this won't deal with the compression. To make it work in this case, you need to tell tar to uncompress the archive as well. In order to do so, tar needs to know whether the package uses bzip2 or gzip compression.


In our example, the package uses gzip. To handle this, add a z to the options. So, to uncompress and extract Wordpress, we need to enter the following:

tar -xzf wordpress-2.6.2.tar.gz

This will create a new folder called wordpress, which contains all the files you need to get Wordpress working on your system. But we're not going to do that (at least, not until at least after the end of the lesson!). Instead, we're going to become familiar with the tar command by using it to both create and extract archives.

If you run ls, you'll notice the original archive is still there. Move it to another directory so it's out of the way, but still there in case you need it. Now, we'll use the wordpress folder you just extracted to create a bzipped tar file.

Now, because you're creating an archive rather than extracting one, you don't use the x option. Instead you use the c option. This is easy to remember as it's c to create, x to extract. You need to include the f option as again you need to specify the filename. The difference is, you also need to specify the path to the folder you want to create an archive from. This makes the default something like this:

tar -cf packagename.tar /folder

But as with extracting the archive, you need to add options to compress it. Fortunately, you can used the same option for each type of compression whether you're creating or extracting, so with gzip you would always put a z. For bzip2, you use j. So, to create an archive of the wordpress folder and compress it with bzip2, you'd enter the following:

tar -cjf wordpress.tar.bz2 wordpress

Notice that again, the original folder is still there. Remove it with the following command to get it out of the way:

rm -rf wordpress

Now, let's just extract this again, then create another archive using and you'll be familiar with extracting and creating both gzipped and bzipped tar files. Enter the following to extract your bzipped tar file:

tar -xjf wordpress.tar.bz2

That should extract the file once more as wordpress. Finally, lets turn it into a gzipped tar file:

tar -czf wordpress.tar.gz wordpress

That's it! Now you should be sufficiently savvy with tar files to be able to extract and create them as you wish!
There are many more options available for tar, such as v, which verbosely lists extracted files (so as it extracts files, it lists them), among others. If you want to know more, I suggest you study the man page for tar, using the following command:

man tar

One final note. Ubuntu does include the unzip utility, which enables you to extract Windows .zip files using the following command:

unzip file.zip

So if you need to transfer something across from Windows to Linux, it's fine to zip it up in Windows and extract it in Linux.
Dealing with tar files is necessary for installing any software that isn't specifically packaged for your distro. If you download a tar file for an application, to install it you need to extract the archive and look in the resulting folder for a text file called something like INSTALL or README. You will usually find something that will give instructions on how to install it. For source code, there will usually be instructions on how to compile the application from source.