Using Wine on Ubuntu

Installing Wine
Make sure you have extra repositories enabled.

In a terminal, type:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install wine

Using Wine
A bit about Wine... I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work with a lot of simple Windows programs. I'll show you how I get Filezilla to work in Linux, as an example.

I download the setup.exe file for Filezilla. When I double-click on it, Wine will try to open the file. Then, the installer appears, just as if I were using Windows. Instead of installing Filezilla to

C:\Program Files\Filezilla\

, I'm going to override the default installation location and install it to

z:\home\username\.wine\drive_c\Program Files\Filezilla

. For some reason,

z:\

is what Wine calls my Ubuntu partition.

Then, I set up a launcher (on the panel or in the menu) for the command

wine "z:\home\username\.wine\drive_c\Program Files\Filezilla\Filezilla.exe"

That's it. Now when I click on that launcher, Filezilla will load up.

Beyond Wine
As I said before, Wine seems to work with some simple Windows programs. For other Windows programs (particularly those that require Windows XP or 2000), you may need Crossover Office (this is not cost-free). If you're into gaming, you may need Cedega (also not cost-free). Other solutions include dual-booting, using two computers and a KVM switch, installing Windows in a VMWare session, or (God forbid) actually using a native Linux program.