Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents
1.1. Overview / About
1.2. What is Wine?
1.3. Other, often "Enhanced" Wine offerings
1.4. Alternatives to Wine you might want to consider
1.5. Basic Wine Requirements

1.1. Overview / About

1.1.1. Purpose of this document and intended audience

This document, called the Wine User Guide, is supposed to be both an easy installation guide and an extensive reference guide. Thus while it completely explains how to install and configure Wine, it also tries to document all configuration features and support areas of the Wine environment as a whole.

It tries to target both the new Wine user (aka "bloody newbie"), by offering a step by step approach, and the experienced Wine user or expert, by offering the reference material mentioned above.

The whole document has been extensively rewritten (in other words: the document then deserved to be called a document :-) by Andreas Mohr in March 2003.

1.1.2. Burning questions and comments

If during reading this document there is something you can't figure out, or think could be explained better, or that should have been included, please immediately mail to either the WineHQ Web-Admin or the wine-devel Mailing List , or post a bug report to Wine's Bugzilla to let us know how this document can be improved. Remember, Open Source is "free as in free speech, not as in free beer": it can only work in the case of very active involvement of its users!

Note that I can't say that I'm too impressed with the amount of feedback about this Guide that we have received so far since I added this paragraph many months ago...

1.1.3. Content overview / Steps to take

This section will try to give you a complete overview of how to go all the way to a fully working Wine installation by following this Guide. We strongly recommend following every single relevant step of this Guide, since you might miss important information otherwise.

First, we start by explaining what Wine is and mentioning everything else that's useful to know about it (that's covered in this very chapter that you're reading a part of right now).

In order to be able to use Wine, you need to obtain a copy of its files first. That's the purpose of the next chapter, Getting Wine: it tries to show you how Wine can be installed on your particular system (i.e. which installation methods are available in your case), and then it explains the various methods: either getting Wine via a binary package file suited for your particular system, or getting it via a Wine source code archive file, or getting the most current Wine development source code via CVS.

Once you got your copy of Wine, you might need to follow the next chapter Compiling if you decided to get Wine source code. Otherwise, the next chapter Installing Wine will explain the methods to use to install the Wine binary files to some location on your system.

Once Wine is installed on your system, the next chapter Configuring Wine will focus on the available configuration methods for Wine to set up a proper Wine/Windows environment with all its requirements: there are either graphical (e.g. WineSetupTk) or text mode (wineinstall) configuration helper applications available that will fully configure the Wine environment for you. And for those people who dislike a fully automated installation (maybe because they really want to know what they're doing), we'll describe how to manually set up a complete Wine environment configuration.

Once the configuration of the Wine environment is done, the next chapter Running Wine will show you how to run Windows programs with Wine and how to satisfy the more specific requirements of certain Windows programs.

In case you run into trouble, the chapter Troubleshooting / Reporting bugs will list and explain some common troubleshooting and debugging methods.