Wine gives users a way to run native Windows programs on a Linux system. If you’re running Manjaro Linux on your computer but need access to a Windows-only application, installing Wine may be the solution for you.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Wine on Manjaro, whether you’d like to install the stable or development package. As a proof of concept, we’ll run a Windows application on Manjaro after Wine has been installed.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Wine on Manjaro
- How to configure Wine
- How to install a Windows application on Linux
Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Manjaro Linux |
Software | Wine |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Install Wine
We’ll be using the Linux command line to update Manjaro and install the Wine packages. Get started by opening a terminal and using the following command to update Manjaro:
$ sudo pacman -Syu
You can install the latest stable version of Wine on Manjaro by entering the following command:
$ sudo pacman -S wine winetricks wine-mono wine_gecko
This will install four different packages. wine
is obviously the main one, but the rest are also recommended. winetricks
is used to automatically install dependencies that certain Windows programs may rely on, wine-mono
is for applications that rely on .NET, and wine-gecko
is for applications that rely on Internet Explorer. Installing those extra packages isn’t necessary, but it may save you a headache later on.
If you prefer to install the development branch, which is a little more updated but not guaranteed to be stable, you install the wine-staging
package in place of the wine
package by using the command below:
$ sudo pacman -S wine-staging
Wine Configuration
A lot of programs will only work if we configure a new 32 bit “Wine prefix.” Open Winetricks from the application launcher to get started.
Select “create new wineprefix” and click OK.
Choose 32 bit for architecture and fill in whatever name you’d like, then click OK.
Once Wine is done configuring the new prefix, you can close Winetricks and move on to the next section of installing a Windows application. Or read below for more Wine configuration options.
Winetricks provides a nice front end for Wine configuration, but Wine itself also has a few different configuration tools you might want to check out. Running Windows programs on Linux isn’t always as simple as installing Wine and being good to go. Windows programs can be complex and nuanced, so you may need to play around with Wine settings to get things running as intended.
The Wine configuration menu can be accessed with this command:
$ winecfg
You’ll be able to configure hard drive access such as C:
under the “drives” tab.
To access Wine’s registry editing tool, execute this command:
$ regedit
To access Wine’s version of the Windows Control Panel, enter this command to launch it:
$ wine control
Run a Windows Program with Wine
Now that Wine is installed, we can try using a Windows program that doesn’t have a Linux port available. I personally like the program Notepad++, which is just a free and basic text editor with some convenient features. Let’s install it by launching Winetricks. You’ll find it inside your GUI’s application launcher:
Winetricks will ask what we’d like to do. Select “install an application” and click OK.
Choose the application you want to install. For our example, we’ll be selecting Notepad++.
Winetricks launches the Notepad++ installer, which we can go through the same as we would on Windows.
Now we can launch Notepad++ and use it as normal.
You can continue using Winetricks to install more Windows applications. There are also a slew of other packages that rely on Wine’s compatibility layer to varying degrees in order to function properly, such as Lutris and PlayOnLinux, which both allow you to install games on Linux.
If you have some other application not listed in Winetricks that you want to try running with Wine, you can always right click the file and select the option to launch with Wine.
Closing Thoughts
In this guide, we learned how to install Wine and the related (but optional) additional packages. We also saw how to configure Wine by using Winetricks and some components of Wine itself.
Getting Windows programs to run on Linux is always a bit clunky, but Wine has a roster of popular programs that are known to work. Use Winetricks to install applications when you can, because those are the apps that you’ll have the most luck with.