Playing Windows games on Ubuntu with Wine

Days of Wine

Jesús De Las Heras , Claudio Cambra , and Paul C. Brown

Although Ubuntu has made great strides in gaming, we sometimes miss the games that are only available on Windows. Linux provides a way to solve this problem with Wine, the Windows "not an emulator."

Wine [1], which is a recursive acronym for "Wine is not an emulator," is an infrastructure of applications and libraries that allows Linux users to execute programs developed for Windows. Versions of Wine also exist for BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

As its name spells out, Wine is not an emulator as such, nor is it a virtualization program; instead, it is an open source implementation of Windows APIs, a series of "libraries" that allows you to execute Windows applications in Linux in much the way Microsoft executes old applications (e.g., MS-DOS applications) in compatibility mode.

Wine is available in Ubuntu's official repositories [2] and can be installed with your package manager of choice. The alternative is to use the official repositories of the project to ensure the latest version is installed with all the most recent security, performance enhancements, and other improvements.

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