WINETRICKS AND PREFIXES

If you do enough experimentation, you’ll soon find a Windows program that doesn’t seem to work with Wine. In this instance, your first port of call should be the Wine Application Database (AppDB, see https://appdb.winehq.org). It’s a user-curated list of applications and how well they work with Wine, with a ratings system and remedial guidance for programs that require a little extra persuasion. Generally, this persuasion involves using Windows native libraries instead of those provided by Wine. Common offenders are the .NET and Visual C runtimes, various codecs and the quartz.dll library, which some games use for video.

Rather than mess around substituting one library at a time, we can use the Winetricks helper script to automate these fixes. Entries in the Wine AppDB often include instructions for Winetricks. An old iteration is included in the Ubuntu repos, so you’re better off following the manual installation instructions at https://github.com/ Winetricks/winetricks.

Wine’s experimental Vulkan renderer needs to be activated by adding a registry key. But we can save several clicks by getting Winetricks to do this for us:

$ winetricks renderer=vulkan

By default (unless you compiled Wine yourself), Wine sets up a 64-bit prefix at ~/.wine. It is absolutely possible to run 32-bit applications from here. But if, for whatever reason, you want to set up a 32-bit prefix at ~/.wine32, you can do so (taking care not to confuse your wins and wines):

$ WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 winecfg