Wine

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is an application compatibility layer that allows Microsoft Windows software to run on Linux and other POSIX-compliant operating systems. This article deals with installing, configuring, and maintaining a general purpose Wine environment on Gentoo.

Wine variants

• app-emulation/wine-vanilla : Upstream Wine with no external patchsets.
• app-emulation/wine-staging : Wine with the Wine Staging patchset.
• app-emulation/wine-proton : Wine with the Valve Software patchset.

Choosing a variant

Additional patchsets may introduce bugs that don't exist in vanilla Wine, but they may also fix others that do.

The app-emulation/wine-proton variant is only the Wine fork which is used to build Proton, and is not a stand-alone version of Proton which comes with Steam. If there are any issues with running applications with it, it would be best to test if the issues can be seen with a build of the upstream Wine as well, and then file a report to the upstream Wine project if none exists.

Installation

USE flags

32-bit vs 64-bit

More often than not, Windows applications will require 32-bit support. This may be true even in the case of 64-bit applications, because they can still use a 32-bit installer.

This means that a lot of dependencies of Wine will require 32-bit support as well. If not enabled for all the packages globally, using the autounmask option with emerge can be helpful with building the list.

Below is an example /etc/portage/package.use/wine file which includes some packages that will need their abi_x86_32 USE flag enabled for 32-bit support:

dev-lang/orc abi_x86_32
media-libs/a52dec abi_x86_32
media-libs/faad2 abi_x86_32
media-libs/graphene abi_x86_32
media-libs/gst-plugins-bad abi_x86_32
media-libs/gst-plugins-base abi_x86_32
media-libs/gst-plugins-good abi_x86_32
media-libs/gst-plugins-ugly abi_x86_32
media-libs/gstreamer abi_x86_32
media-libs/libdca abi_x86_32
media-libs/libmpeg2 abi_x86_32
media-libs/vulkan-loader abi_x86_32
media-libs/x264 abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-a52dec abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-dts abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-dvdread abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-faad abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-flac abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpeg2dec abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpg123 abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-pulse abi_x86_32
media-plugins/gst-plugins-x264 abi_x86_32
sys-libs/libunwind abi_x86_32
x11-libs/libXv abi_x86_32

Compiling Wine with the wow64 USE-flag enabled will enable running 32-bit applications without building Wine and its dependencies with 32-bit support enabled.

Until Wine 11.0, upstream considered this feature as experimental, and many applications might still be unusable after this point in Wine, but a lot of applications might also perform perfectly fine.

Some problems may be worked around via use of Vulkan, meaning hardware not capable of supporting Vulkan may suffer from more issues.

It is possible to test this by setting the WINEARCH variable to wow64 when creating a new Wine prefix, while still building with the USE-flag disabled.

Build-time environment variables

The live (9999) ebuilds support setting the repository branch, commit, commit date, and repo via the following environment variables:

• EGIT_OVERRIDE_BRANCH
• EGIT_OVERRIDE_COMMIT
• EGIT_OVERRIDE_COMMIT_DATE
• EGIT_OVERRIDE_REPO

As an 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 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.

Configuration

Kernel

Device Drivers --->
 Misc devices --->
 <M> NT synchronization primitive emulation Search for <code>CONFIG_NTSYNC</code> to find this item.

The advantage of building ntsync as a kernel module is that it may only be loaded when needed. This will create the character device /dev/ntsync.

To manually load ntsync with root privileges:

Since Wine and Proton will not autoload the ntsync module, in the case of frequent use it is recommended to either build it into the kernel, or to automatically load it on startup.

ntsync

Alternatively, a udev rule may autoload the module upon access to /dev/ntsync.

SUBSYSTEM=="misc", KERNEL=="ntsync", MODE="660", TAG+="uaccess"

Ensure that /dev/ntsync is available while Wine or Proton is running.

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.

WINEPREFIX

To create a Wine prefix in a custom location (instead of ~/.wine) without affecting the default:

The above would create a Wine prefix at /home/<user>/.wine-someprefix.

WINEARCH

To create a 32-bit installation instead of the default (when built) 64-bit:

To create a prefix supporting both, 32-bit and 64-bit applications using the new style of WOW64, which can be done with USE="-wow64" builds as well:

The Wine executable used could be anything that runs Wine, such as winecfg, which often makes sense while creating a clean, new prefix.

WINEARCH requires that Wine be built with the corresponding abi_x86 flags.

WINEDEBUG

Essential in finding out why an application is misbehaving when the basic terminal output or messages boxes are not enough. See https://wiki.winehq.org/Debug_Channels for examples.

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.

Graphics drivers

Graphics registry value is comma separated string and REG_SZ type.

Default (on linux)

For enabling only experimental wayland driver:

Easy Anti Cheat Support

Due to DT_HASH not being enabled by default since glibc 2.36 then the follow needs to be applied to allow EAC games to work

sys-libs/glibc hash-sysv-compat

Upstream FAQs

Some upstream FAQ entries that users might find useful:

• How to uninstall individual applications
• How to remove a Wine prefix
• How to prevent Wine from creating menu items

Troubleshooting

When a user encounters a problem with an application, they should try the latest development version to see if the unwanted behavior still exists. If Wine has been built with options such as -fomit-frame-pointer or --hash-style=both, the Wine developers will likely be unable to help with the issue, and reports including output from such builds should not be reported to the Wine Bugzilla.

The strip USE flag should be disabled for debugging MinGW builds.

For more directions on reporting bugs, see Bugzilla and Bugs at wiki.winehq.

Applications Crashing

Some applications such as games may crash on startup giving errors such as "page fault on read access". To mitigate this inside your wine scripts make sure you change directory to inside the game folder instead of running the game by specifying the path for it.

# Environment variables
game_dir="/path/to/game/dir/"
WINEPREFIX="${game_dir}/wineprefix/"

cd${game_dir}
wine"game.exe"

Support

Users may find additional support in the #gentoo-wine (webchat ) channel on Libera.Chat.

See also

• DOSEMU — an application compatibility layer for MS-DOS geared more towards running MS-DOS applications than running games.
• Game emulators — list of game emulators packaged by Gentoo-
• Lutris — an open source gaming platform for Linux.
• Steam — a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
• Winetricks — an easy way to work around problems in Wine.

External resources

• Gentoo bugtracker: known bugs — Wine related bugs.
• Wine Application Database — Search for the game or program to install here to see if it is stable.
• Wine Staging at GitHub
• WineHQ Wiki
• Darling — a Darwin and macOS application comparability layer for Linux.

References

• Emulation