In our earlier articles on this blog, we used Wine program to install and run windows based applications on Ubuntu and other Red Hat based Linux distributions. There is another open source software available called PlayOnLinux that uses Wine as its base and gives a feature rich functions and a user friendly interface to install and run windows application on Linux. The purpose of this software is to simplify and automates the process of installing and running windows applications on Linux platforms. It has a list of applications where you can automates each installation process as much as you can.
What is PlayOnLinux?
PlayOnLinux (POL) is an open source gaming framework (software) based on Wine, that allows you to easily install any Windows based applications and games on Linux operating systems, via the use of Wine as front-end interface.
What are PlayOnLinux’s features?
The following are the list of some interesting features to know.
- PlayOnLinux is license free, no need of Windows License.
- PlayOnLinux uses base as Wine
- PlayOnLinux is a open source and free software.
- PlayOnLinux is written in Bash and Python.
In this article, I will guide you on how to install, setup and use PlayonLinux on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian distributions. You can also use these instructions for Xubuntu and Linux Mint.
How to Install PlayOnLinux in Linux Distributions
PlayOnLinux is in Fedora’s software repositories, so you can add the repository and install the PlayonLinux software using the following commands.
For RHEL/CentOS/Fedora
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/playonlinux.repo
[playonlinux] name=PlayOnLinux Official repository baseurl=http://rpm.playonlinux.com/fedora/yum/base enable=1 gpgcheck=0 gpgkey=http://rpm.playonlinux.com/public.gpg
yum install playonlinux
For Debian
With the Squeeze repository
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | apt-key add - wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_squeeze.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list apt-get update apt-get install playonlinux
With the Lenny repository
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | apt-key add - wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_lenny.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list apt-get update apt-get install playonlinux
With the Etch repository
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | apt-key add - wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list apt-get update apt-get install playonlinux
For Ubuntu
For the Precise 12.04 version
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_precise.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux
For the Oneiric 11.10 version
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_oneiric.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux
For the Natty 11.04 version
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_natty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux
For the Maverick 10.10 version
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_maverick.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux
For the Lucid 10.04 version
wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_lucid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux
How do I Start PlayOnLinux
Once it’s installed, you can start the PlayOnLinux as normal user from the application menu or use the following command to start it.
# playonlinux
$ playonlinux
Once you start PlayOnLinux, it starts with wizard that automatically download and install required software’s such as Microsoft fonts. Go through the wizard as shown below.
How do I Install Applications?
Once it’s done, click on ‘Install‘ button to explore available software’s or search for software’s. PlayonLinux provides some supported games, you can search them using ‘Search’ tab as shown below.
This way, you can search and install as many as Windows supported applications and games in your Linux.
I tried to install a pc game called Bioshock using playonlinux after 8 hours and a little circle was going around and around and the game wasn’t installed yet.
Any advice? I have also installed wine and winetricks.
yum install epel-release
in my case, i just do this.
I’m running rhel desktop 7.3, I added the repo and when try to install show this error if dependencies, I tried to install it form rpmfind, it require other, and other another and need to search manually all the dependencies … :(, do you know how can I do for resolve for more ease the installation?
Error: Paquete: wine-core-1.8.6-1.el7.x86_64 (epel) Necesita: mesa-libOSMesa(x86-64) Error: Paquete: playonlinux-4.2.10-fedora0.noarch (playonlinux) Necesita: redhat-lsbThe first mesa-libOSMesa installed without problems but redhat-lsb, ….. is the problem.
thank you
when i trying to play this…… This Error found (cabextract not found)……..
try to google but prob not solve…
Jitendra,
Try to install these following packages to get rid of such cabextract not found error.
Big thanks for the fedora repo file, much appreciated!!!
after installing the playonlinux it shows
[[email protected] ~]# sudo playonlinux
Looking for python… 2.6.6 – selected
PlayOnLinux is not supposed to be run as root. Sorry……………
Can you please help me that ………………………….Thanku
Just run ‘playonlinux’ as normal user..
i have a problem :/ wine is not runing a game :/
Error: Multilib version problems found. This often means that the root
cause is something else and multilib version checking is just
pointing out that there is a problem. Eg.:
1. You have an upgrade for libwayland-server which is missing some
dependency that another package requires. Yum is trying to
solve this by installing an older version of libwayland-server of the
different architecture. If you exclude the bad architecture
yum will tell you what the root cause is (which package
requires what). You can try redoing the upgrade with
–exclude libwayland-server.otherarch … this should give you an error
message showing the root cause of the problem.
2. You have multiple architectures of libwayland-server installed, but
yum can only see an upgrade for one of those arcitectures.
If you don’t want/need both architectures anymore then you
can remove the one with the missing update and everything
will work.
3. You have duplicate versions of libwayland-server installed already.
You can use “yum check” to get yum show these errors.
…you can also use –setopt=protected_multilib=false to remove
this checking, however this is almost never the correct thing to
do as something else is very likely to go wrong (often causing
much more problems).
Protected multilib versions: libwayland-server-1.0.5-1.fc18.i686 != libwayland-server-1.0.0-1.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: fontconfig-2.10.2-2.fc18.i686 != fontconfig-2.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: pixman-0.28.0-1.fc18.i686 != pixman-0.26.2-5.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: cyrus-sasl-lib-2.1.23-37.fc18.i686 != cyrus-sasl-lib-2.1.23-36.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: libwayland-client-1.0.5-1.fc18.i686 != libwayland-client-1.0.0-1.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: libjpeg-turbo-1.2.90-1.fc18.i686 != libjpeg-turbo-1.2.1-3.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: pulseaudio-libs-2.1-6.fc18.i686 != pulseaudio-libs-2.1-4.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: harfbuzz-0.9.12-2.fc18.i686 != harfbuzz-0.9.7-1.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: glib2-2.34.2-2.fc18.i686 != glib2-2.34.2-1.fc18.x86_64
Error: Protected multilib versions: graphite2-1.1.1-4.fc18.i686 != graphite2-1.1.1-3.fc18.x86_64
Thanks, Successful Run
When I run “PlayOnLinux” got Error message
“playonlinux cannot find curl (from curl)
you need to install it to continue”
and I have run the “sudo apt-get install curl” then run it Successful
sudo apt-get install curl
Internet Explorer 1 to 8 are Available in PlayonLinux. IE 10 are not available.
Sorry, no support for IE 10 yet in PlayonLinux. It’s better to Install Wine and install IE 10.