Chapter 4. Installing or uninstalling Wine

Table of Contents
4.1. Installing or uninstalling Wine packages
4.2. Installing or uninstalling a Wine source code tree

A standard Wine distribution form (which you probably downloaded according to chapter Getting Wine) includes quite a few different programs, libraries and configuration files. All of these must be set up properly for Wine to work well. In order to achieve this, this chapter will guide you through the necessary steps to get the Wine files installed on your system. It will not deal with how to get Wine's Windows environment configured; that's what the next chapter will talk about.

When installing Wine, you should make sure that it doesn't happen to overwrite a previous Wine installation (as this would cause an overwhelming amount of annoying and fatal conflicts); uninstalling any previous Wine version (as explained in this chapter) to avoid this problem is recommended.

4.1. Installing or uninstalling Wine packages

Now that you have downloaded the Debian or RPM or whatever Wine package file, probably via the instructions given in the previous chapter, you may be wondering "What in the world do I do with this thing?". This section will hopefully be able to put an end to your bewildered questioning, by giving detailed install instructions for all sorts of well-known package types.

4.1.1. Debian Linux

In case you haven't downloaded and automatically installed the Wine package file via apt-get as described in the Getting Wine section, you now need to use dpkg to install it. Switch to the directory you downloaded the Debian .deb package file to. Once there, type these commands, adapting the package file name as required:

$ su -
Password:
# cd /home/user
# dpkg -i wine_0.0.20030115-1.deb

(Type the root password at the "Password:" prompt)

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.

Uninstalling an installed Wine Debian package can be done by running:

# dpkg -l|grep wine

The second column of the output (if any) of this command will indicate the installed packages dealing with "wine". The corresponding packages can be uninstalled by running:

# dpkg -r <package_name>

where <package_name> is the name of the Wine-related package which you want to uninstall.

4.1.2. Red Hat (RPM) Linux

Switch to the directory you downloaded the RPM package file to. Once there, type this one command as root, adapting the package file name as required:

# rpm -ivh wine-20020605-2.i386.rpm

You may also want to install the wine-devel package.

Uninstalling an installed Wine RPM package can be done by running:

# rpm -qa|grep -i wine

This command will indicate the installed packages dealing with "wine". The corresponding packages can be uninstalled by running:

# rpm -e <package_name>

where <package_name> is the name of the Wine-related package which you want to uninstall.