Wine 4.0 Stable Released – Install on RHEL, CentOS and Fedora

Wine is an open source and free application for Linux that enables users to run any windows based application on Unix/Linux like operating system. Wine team keeps releasing their versions in every two weeks.

Finally, the Wine team proudly announced the stable release of Wine 4.0 and made available for download in source and binary packages for various distributions such as Linux, Windows and Mac.

This release describes a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It includes a large number of enhancements that are recorded in the release notes below. The main highlights are:

• Vulkan support.
• Direct3D 12 support.
• Game controllers support.
• High-DPI support on Android.

For a complete summary of major changes, See the release notes of Wine 4.0 at http://www.winehq.org/announce/4.0

Read Also : Install Wine 4.0 in Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint

In this article we will guide you a simplest way to install the latest release of Wine 4.0 version in RHEL 7.x/6.x, CentOS 7.x/6.x and Fedora 28-29 using source code (difficult and only suitable for experts) and epel repository (easy and recommended for new users).

Installing Wine 4.0 Using Source Code

Step 1: Installing Dependency Packages

We need to install ‘Development Tools‘ with some core development tools such as gcc, flex, bison, debuggers etc. these software’s are must required to compile and build new packages, install them using YUM command.

# yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'
# yum install libX11-devel freetype-devel zlib-devel libxcb-devel libxslt-devel libgcrypt-devel libxml2-devel gnutls-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libtiff-devel gstreamer-devel dbus-devel fontconfig-devel

Note: On Fedora 22+ versions, yum package manager no longer in use, you should use dnf instead yum in the command below.

# dnf -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'
# dnf -y install libX11-devel freetype-devel zlib-devel libxcb-devel libxslt-devel libgcrypt-devel libxml2-devel gnutls-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libtiff-devel gstreamer-devel dbus-devel fontconfig-devel

Read more about Learn dnf command with these 27 examples.

If you are using latest version of Fedora 28 or Fedora 29, you can install Wine 4.0 using official Wine repository as shown.

---------- On Fedora 29 ---------- 
# dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/29/winehq.repo
# dnf install winehq-stable

---------- On Fedora 28 ---------- 
# dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/28/winehq.repo
# dnf install winehq-stable

Step 2: Downloading Wine 4.0

Download the source file using wget command under /tmp directory as a normal User.

$ cd /tmp
$ wget  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/4.0/wine-4.0.tar.xz

Step 3: Extracting Wine 4.0

Once the file is downloaded under /tmp directory, use the below tar command to extract it.

$ tar -xvf wine-4.0.tar.xz -C /tmp/

Step 4: Installing Wine 4.0 in Linux

It is recommended to compile and build Wine installer as a normal User. Run the following commands as normal user.

Note : The installer might take up-to 20-30 minutes and in the middle it will ask you to enter root password.

---------- On 32-bit Systems ---------- 
$ cd wine-4.0/
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install			[Run as root User]

---------- On 64-bit Systems ---------- 
$ cd wine-4.0/
$ ./configure --enable-win64
$ make
# make install			[Run as root User]

Install Wine Using EPEL Repository

Note: If you don’t want to mess with these all source code compilation and installation, there is an easy way using epel repository, but the available version of wine bit older.

Let’s first install and enable EPEL repository to install wine as shown:

# yum install epel-release
# yum install wine

Once the installation completes run the “winecfg” configuration tool from KDE or GNOME desktop to see the supported configuration. If you don’t have any of the desktop, you can install it by using the below command as root user.

# yum groupinstall "X Window System" "GNOME Desktop Environment"
OR
# yum groupinstall "X Window System" "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

# yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop" [On CentOS 7]

# yum groupinstall "Server with GUI" [On RHEL 7]

Once the X Window System installed, run the command as normal user to see wine configuration.

$ winecfg 

Step 5: Running Wine 4.0

To run the Wine, you must specify the full path to the executable program or program name as shown in example below.

--------- On 32-bit Systems ---------
$ wine notepad
$ wine c:\\windows\\notepad.exe

--------- On 64-bit Systems ---------
$ wine64 notepad
$ wine64 c:\\windows\\notepad.exe

Wine is not perfect, because while using wine we see so many programs crashes. I think wine team will soon fix all bugs in their upcoming version and meanwhile do share your comments using our below form.