Wine

Quick start

For most users, worrying about the various packages and what they do should not be a concern.The split packaging and slotting is a power user feature, and most users will be OK with simply installing virtual/wine, which chooses which wine version for the user.

Wine variants

• app-emulation/wine-vanilla: upstream Wine with no external patchsets.

  (like if the old packaging forced USE="-staging -d3d9".)

• app-emulation/wine-staging: Wine with Wine-Staging's patchset.

  (like if the old packaging forced USE="+staging -d3d9".)

• app-emulation/wine-d3d9: Wine with Ixit's Gallium Nine patchset.

  (like if the old packaging forced USE="-staging +d3d9".)

  Deprecated and unmaintained, available only via the Wine overlay. Use app-emulation/gallium-nine-standalone instead.

• app-emulation/wine-any: Wine with any of the patchsets or flags.

  (exactly like the old packaging regarding USE flags.)

  Deprecated and unmaintained, available only via the Wine overlay.

  wine-any exists to allow the user to build any combination that they'd like (like the old packaging). This means the user could use wine-any to use both Wine-Staging and Gallium Nine. Alternatively, the user could use wine-any to try out another configuration from other packages. For example, the user could build wine-vanilla without PulseAudio, and could build wine-any with PulseAudio. The sky is the limit on how a user may choose to use app-emulation/wine-any.

USE flags

Users may also find information about specific USE flags required to run their applications here.

32-bit vs 64-bit

Invariably, users want to understand why they have to rebuild tons of packages to install Wine because they have to enable abi_x86_32 on a lot of Wine's dependencies... This is unavoidable, and we must highly warn against disabling abi_x86_32 and installing only with abi_x86_64 unless you really know what you are doing. Often, an application will have components that are 32-bit (or even 16-bit) and by installing Wine without 32-bit support, the user is left unable to install or launch an application. It is best to enable 32-bit support on a per-package basis, as indicated by the package manager, rather than globally.

Note that some dependencies of Wine need CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME set in the kernel config to work. Failing to do so will generate error messages of the kind: “The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.” during build or at runtime. Affected are for example the packages dev-libs/icu^[1] and sys-devel/llvm.

Environment variables

Traditionally, live (9999) ebuilds support setting the repository commit as an environmental variable. This poses some issues with an ebuild that has multiple upstream repositories. To work around this issue, Wine's live ebuilds support three environmental variables for individually configuring the commit that each repository checks out. The WineHQ repository is controlled by WINE_COMMIT, Wine-Staging repository by STAGING_COMMIT, and Ixit's Gallium Nine repository by D3D9_COMMIT. The *_COMMIT variables may contain either a commit hash from that repository or a git tag from that repository.

For example, one could select the WineHQ tag "wine-2.0-rc5" to emerge the 2.0 RC 5:

One could additionally pin Wine-Staging to the same release by finding the appropriate tag, "v2.0-rc5" and augmenting the previous as follows:

Other environmental variables, which affect Wine at runtime, are discussed below.

Emerge

Enable the USE flags of your choosing on the virtual and then on the variant selected (automatically by the virtual or manually by yourself) and emerge the package:

or

Only versions classified as "stable" by upstream will be stabilized in Gentoo, and only as the app-emulation/wine-vanilla variant, as external patchsets are not considered stable. Some users may opt to add Wine variants to their package.accept_keywords file to allow for installation of development versions of Wine.

Runtime environment variables

The environment variables of the shell that wine is started from are made accessible to the Windows/DOS processes. Some very useful Wine-specific variables include, but are not limited to, WINEPREFIX, WINEARCH, and WINEDEBUG.

See the man wine and man wineserver manual entries for more detailed information concerning Wine's environment variables.

Configuration tools

The following tools include graphical and command line interfaces for managing Wine prefixes:

• app-emulation/q4wine – Qt5 GUI configuration tool for Wine.
• app-emulation/winetricks – Easy way to install DLLs needed to work around problems in Wine.
• app-emulation/playonlinux – Set of scripts to easily install and use Windows games and software.

Support

Users may find additional support in the #gentoo-wine channel on Freenode.