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Installing Wine on Mandriva

30 November -0001

Recently I decided to install Wine so that I could run some old Windows games that I had purchased for next to nothing. After a couple of years it seems that game values plummet. I took a look at the Mandriva RPM's but they were a little older than the current Wine distribution and I know a lot of active development goes into Wine so I decided to download and compile the source myself to get the latest version. There are quite a few snafus in the install, so be sure to watch errors carefully. You'll need a few libraries installed beforehand to make sure things go smoothly. In any case remember 'urpmq -f' is your friend for finding packages. The first thing to do is download the distribution .tar.gz from Wine. Next unpack the archive using:

$ tar -xvzf wine-0.9.42.tar.gz

Note that your version may differ depending on when you download the archive. Next install two dependencies that I know of (there may be more that I already happened to have installed):

$ sudo urpmi xorg-x11-devel
$ sudo urpmi fontforge

Next begin the install by changing into the unpacked directory and beginning to make the installation:

$ cd wine-0.9.42/
$ sudo ./configure
$ sudo make depend
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install

Keep an eye on any error messages that come up at the end of the copious text that will barf all over the screen when you issue each command. These will provide critical clues to any missing pieces. Next you have to set up the Wine defaults. This process creates disk space for libraries, installs, and other files. Use the command:

$ wineprefixcreate

Finally, if you can, copy over all your Windows system fonts from your windows partition. This will make the font presentation a lot prettier in your Wine programs:

$ cp /mnt/win_c/WINDOWS/Fonts/* ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/

Finally make your final configuration changes using the Wine config script.

$ winecfg

At this point you should be good. Feel free to refer to the official documentation at any time http://www.winehq.org/site/documentation for more authoritative instructions.