Windows Programs on Linux | Introduction to WINE

in this video I'm going over running Windows programs in Linux so to start out with I actually switched to Linux about six months ago and I wanted to learn all the things I needed to bring over from Windows most people in the Linux community are very hmm let's just say unfriendly to the idea of running Windows programs in Linux just because it's considered impure however I'm not one of those people I really love running a ton of Windows programs in my Linux boxes it just depends on what it is it can be games it can be applications that I miss from it obviously there's a whole variety of things but I wanted to go over the ways we make this happen to where it'll help you transition to Linux and obviously some things you'll find as far as the free and open-source programs that Linux offers you'll actually start to transition to them over the Windows counterparts however that doesn't happen overnight and most people just glance over that fact that's what this video is about getting those Windows programs that you're so accustomed to running in Linux and then you know slowly transitioning to alternatives that are more Linux friendly so there's two ways to actually make Windows programs run in Linux the very first and this is like the de-facto everyone can do it in every program works without very much configuration at all and that is running an introvert roll machine this is not good for a whole variety of reasons one that virtual machine is basically another operating system running on top of Linux so essentially you're running Linux and windows at the same time so performance is sluggish and it doesn't integrate so well with actual system so that's the why I don't like running a virtual machine and I rarely ever run any program in virtual machine and especially after I learned all these things about wine and wine is basically a way to make a Windows pro Grahame run in Linux almost natively and what wine does it stands for wine is not an emulator it's not a virtual machine it's in not any of those things basically it takes Windows system calls converts them to what's called POSIX system calls and this is what Linux needs to read that program this can happen a whole variety of ways but just know it's pretty darn slick and once you get it set up right it will literally make these programs run better than the Windows counterparts because you don't have all that Windows crap and overhead that happens with it so a wine I love I use it daily there's not a day that goes by where I'm not using the crap out of wine or a whole host of things because Linux is my daily driver I've fully switched however there are certain things you know some free and open software that I just don't like as far as the look and feel I'm so used to ingrained and institutionalized to use certain Windows programs so that's why I use wine and it's a not well explained by either the wine community or the Lynx community on how to use it so I'm gonna give my best shot to do that today so I'm gonna flip over to terminal now when it comes to wine there's front-ends graphic user and front-ends like play on linux crossover Lutra sifting all these things that actually use wine as the driver or the the backend it just like the brains that run all these programs and even other programs like steams proton that's just a fork of wine it's just another version of wine that steam basically made it to where you don't have to do any of this but if you're interested in actually learning and utilizing pretty much any Windows program in Linux you can use wine to do some just fantastic things as long as you understand the basics so let's go ahead and get into that the very first thing I'm going to be talking about is wine bottles and just think of it this way they're containers and these containers are basically folders so that one little folder holds all the information your program needs to communicate with your Linux installation so that's called a wine bottle and what I like to do is any windows-based program I make their own wine model for because I customize these bottles specifically for that program so when they're doing these calls back and forth to communicate with Linux they can do it in a very efficient manner and if I screw something up it's not that big a deal I can just delete it and create a new bottle and then try again so with that said let's go ahead and jump over to the terminal now when it comes to wine usage you're gonna be working in terminal almost exclusively I'll talk about other tools such as loot hrus and play on Linux and crossover in a separate video but for this one we will solely be talking about wine and its use in terminal so the very first thing I like to do is make a dedicated directory for any wine bottles or wine environments that I'm going to create so let's go ahead and make a directory called wine now if you don't do this and just start typing in wine commands it will make its own directory that will be hidden it'll be by default your home directory dot line and that will be the de-facto wine bottle now that we've made our wine directory we'll go ahead and change the directory using CD and from here we can start making wine bottles now I'm just gonna do a listing show you it's empty and the very first thing to create a fresh bottle is we need to determine do we want it to be win32 or Wynn 64 so we do this by doing wine arch for architecture and then Wynn 32 or 64 respectively now I like to use win32 for pretty much any application I typically use Wynn 64 for pretty much any game unless otherwise directed once we've determined the architecture we also need to now make the prefix so we do wine prefix equals and then I do a tiddly forward slash wine Ord slash and this is where we actually name the bottle so let's name this test bottle and then we just need one more command to finalize this and for this I always like to start out with wine tricks with wine tricks you can do a lot of powerful things so hey does this need to have dotnet and other other things so here it is actually setting up the wine bottle it took a little bit to launch the initial initial time through usually about 30 seconds to a minute on most pcs now from here on this screen you almost always will select select the default wine prefix and hit OK and from here you can look on the very title bar here and you'll notice that this is the current prefix it went ahead and pulled all this in by those commands we entered it in the terminal now you can install fonts and DLL files so let's go ahead and kind of show you some of the options you have when it comes to wine tricks the very first thing is installing the DLL in components now once I figure out kind of what these are I usually type it into terminal in that way I don't have to mess around with the GUI here and I'll show you that in later videos also some of my game configuration videos I've already done this just know you don't have to do it from the GUI you can actually do wine tricks space cabinet or sin pack or whatever package you're actually doing and it automatically does it in an unintended mode which is a lot nicer so I'm gonna go through these fairly quick and just kind of hit the highlights of what I always am using in wine tricks it's very important to know don't just go crazy in here and start installing everything because it's gonna end up in disaster you want to start with a fresh bottle launch the program see what you need or and go directly on the actual applications website see what the requirements are and only install those requirements and there's some caveats to that that I'm about to go over so the first is do you install any d3 dx9 10 or 11 s now most of the DX 10 and 11s I never used because most of this is done through D xvk I usually leave it is from stock unless I get an error and then I might come back in and touch on these however if I'm using DirectX 9 I will actually come in here and usually tick this box to go ahead and just do the DirectX 9 install with all these dll's so this is a very common option especially when it comes to gaming or things that use DirectX 9 other options in here which I honestly think are pretty obsolete especially when using one 4.0 and above is all these right in here I never use direct ixnay here this is usually overkill as said on this point right here and I actually use the other one up at the top so I don't really understand why this option exists there's probably maybe one or two games out there that might utilize it but for the most part I never use it also direct play direct music D input 8 all these other ones I have some really old games that I've compiled in the latest versions of the line and I noticed I didn't need any of these options for it they just worked right out of the box the latest one that I've tried was Final Fantasy 11 online and the actual DirectX or the wine HQ how-to guide had me installed tons of packages which none of them were required and I really only needed two packages to get that game working and instead of installing all of these other ones so most of these I do not ever use so the very first caveat that I wanted to talk about is dotnet dotnet doesn't work very well in wine tricks and you have to install them in a certain order my go-to order here is usually just do dotnet 3 5 and then dotnet 5 2 now these two will actually install everything in between them and between them you'll probably get probably about 90% of the dotnet stuff working with just these 2 packages a lot of people go crazy and kind of bounce around and install a whole bunch of dotnet stuff and really you run into a lot of errors that way I find just doing dotnet 3 5 first and then doing dotnet 4 5 2 next will actually install everything in between and it will catch almost all of your applications this includes applications that are net - oh please note do install.net - oh if you intend to go to dotnet 3 5 because dotnet 3 5 will throw up a whole bunch errors and they'll just be nasty same with dot net 4 or 5 - if you installed dotnet 400 dotnet 4 5 - we'll run into problems so that's not met in a nutshell just be very careful here and if you mess up just you're gonna have to delete your wine bottle and start all over so just very important to note when messing around with dotnet now right here is a really good thing I want to point out is DX BK now earlier in the video I said hey don't use DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 as above you'd want DX BK this is what I was talking about DX BK is very powerful especially with all the advancements in it when it comes to games based on DirectX 10 and 11 now this is expanding into DirectX 9 but it's not quite fully baked yet later this year all the direct exede be right into the DX VK realm and they're gonna see some near native performance just like our DirectX 10 and 11 games other common install libraries is the VC or the Visual C++ libraries there's also some dependencies in here such as 2017 needs to you see how the actual dll's are the same so if you have a 2017 don't install 2015 and if you need something that's 2015 don't install 2017 because as you see the dll's match up everything else can be installed so you could technically do this number if an application required that many Visual C++ libraries and there's a couple out there that do just know that when you get to 2015 and 17 you gotta kind of be careful is it a really recent application that does utilize the 2017 then make sure to just do this if it's an older one around the 2015 error you're gonna want just 2015 and probably the last application or actual package I'll talk about is X input for Xbox controller support most instances I don't need to actually do this however some games I know do utilize X input to make an X controller working and sometimes getting joysticks working in wine can be a little bit of headache first try it without enabling this and then if you still need it and you're not able to register your Xbox controller then come back and enable it other notable frameworks here is the X Act I've used X Act a lot on certain games that require in certain applications that require X Act I don't ever do it unless it actually specifically calls for it but just keep that in the Munt your back your mind when you're doing this is X Act is required by some applications and before I let you go on this section but one thing I kind of skimmed over here was GDI plus some applications do require MSG di plus just kind of pay attention when you're actually doing this so with Windows DLL and component installation let's go ahead and go into fonts and I'll show you this one now this one I highly recommend doing through terminal just because you will avoid so many prompts by doing it through the terminal because doing it from here there is a ton of interaction that I just don't like now when it comes to fonts on almost all of them there's one package I always put on most of my wine bottles and that is core fonts these are the core microsoft fonts that are really needed for most applications out there so whenever I'm doing like Windows based applications I always enable core fonts and then usually as an extra step as well I come down into Tahoma that's another one that I really like it's not part of core fonts but many Microsoft programs rely on and then once we have our fonts and components set up usually I come into and run wine config this sets the actual environment up because when you do a bunch of like dotnet and things of this nature it will change the actual Windows version so in here a lot of times this gets set to like Windows XP or Windows 2003 what you need to do I usually start with Windows 7 now I usually hit apply here and I always set it at windows 7 to start out with because it has probably the best compatibility based on everything if it still doesn't work and it's a newer application typically I'll take this up to like a Windows a eight point one and then finally do my testing with Windows 10 I almost never go under Windows 7 and go into these older operating systems as it usually ends in disaster so with that done I simply go ahead and quit out I just hit and cancel and cancel and then if you look in here the actual wine bottle is set up and if we go into change directories into the test bottle you'll see that it has this structure this is basically the Windows registry and a sample file system so if I'm needling to utilize setup.exe file I usually drop it directly into the root of drive C and then run it from here so just important to note and to run applications directly from here in your wine bottle we'll just go ahead and pull up our last command and instead of wine tricks I do wine space The Home wine best bottle drive C and then if you put it right in the rib you can just go test program XE and this would go ahead and launch that test program utilizing wine and this wine bottle with all those options we've already said all right so that was lying in a nutshell I went pretty fast on this I tried to break it down into simplistic terms there's gonna be some stuff that it's it's still a very complex subject to really master and there's still things I learn on a daily basis about it but just know this is the things to get you started with your own thing just remember the basics create your wine bottle install your application using those and then from there you should be able to expand in it now this is just the introduction I'm gonna go further in how to customize it using like virtual desktop and other aspects of wine that are really needed using different wine versions depending on compatibility and that just remember the key things 1 don't ever run wine as route or as a pseudo command it should always run as your user because it isolates that to that wine bottle where that user so the worst case that happens let's say you run a vie in wine it will only have access to your user files which is obviously not ideal but at the same time it's not going to mess up your system it's not gonna do anything like that so it's far safer than if you were running in Windows per se the second thing is sometimes these programs get hung up especially when you're experimenting and just getting them going remember to actually kill all wine processes and I'll leave a link in the description to where you can easily run like a command or a script to go ahead and kill all those wine processes know that if you're using Lutra stay actually have a kill all wine processes button and it has a lot of really cool things which I'm going to actually go over in tomorrow's video when I go over a loot hrus and the third thing to remember here is always always remember use trusted sources use programs that are good if you're trying to use like pirated software and hinder try to do that in wine that's probably gonna end up bad for you because a lot of pirated software has viruses and other nasties in them running them into a wine is a recipe for disaster so I highly discourage that type of behavior when utilizing wine and when it comes to gaming dxv ki kind of briefly brushed over it in this video but I'm gonna leave a link in the description below and a title card up here where it kind of go into a whole video of installing a sink in D xvk for gaming purposes but for this video I didn't want to actually do that because I've already done it so you can check out that video if that interests you so with all that said I know this went really quick and there's still a lot more material to cover but this is mainly just to get your feet wet understand the basics of wine I'm gonna launch more into a more advanced course online and how to get programs running how to do be it bug them how to convert these windows programs and get them running on your Linux box in a future video but let me know in the comments below what you thought of this what did I miss one things that you probably would recommend especially coming into one I just kind of wanted to give a round a basis of foundation of experimenting and wine as a newcomer coming to Linux and using those Windows programs that you know and love so with that said guys I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 159,193

Keywords: chris titus tech, linux, wine, windows, running windows programs on linux, windows on linux, wine linux, install wine and run windows app on ubuntu 18.04, windows programs, how to install wine on ubuntu 18.04, how to install wine on ubuntu 18.04 lts, linux mint, wine (software), windows program, run windows programs on linux mint, run windows programs on linux or ubuntu, install windows programs on linux, play on linux, windows games on linux, Windows programs on linux

Id: lI09QLkqZiE

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019