How To Install Wine 5.1 on CentOS/RHEL 8

With the increasing popularity of Linux desktops, There is another requirement occurred that we should have an application that can be used to run Windows applications. Windows has a long list of beautiful applications for users who are not available for Linux users. As we know that Linux does not support windows executable so WineHQ is a solution to run Windows applications and Linux systems.

This article will help you to install Wine 5.1 Stable Release on RHEL based systems. The Fedora users can use official yum repository provided by Wine team for the installation of latest Wine packages.

Step 1 – Prerequisite

First of all, become root user on your CentOS 8 system. Then continue to the tutorial.

sudo -i

Wine required many development packages. First, we recommend upgrading all system packages using the following commands.

dnf clean all
dnf update

Now install required packages for Wine using yum package manager using following commands.

dnf groupinstall 'Development Tools'
dnf install libX11-devel zlib-devel libxcb-devel libxslt-devel libgcrypt-devel libxml2-devel gnutls-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libtiff-devel gstreamer-devel dbus-devel fontconfig-devel freetype-devel 

Step 2 – Install Wine on CentOS 8

RPM packages for wine are not available for the latest versions, So we need to download wine source code. Use the below commands to download it.

cd /opt
wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.1.tar.xz
tar -Jxf wine-5.1.tar.xz
cd wine-5.1

Configure wine using one of the following commands based on your system architecture. This will set the installation environment for Wine according to your system.

For 32-Bit Systems:
./configure

For 64-Bit Systems:
./configure  --enable-win64

Finally, run the make and make install command to compile the wine source and install it on your system.

make
make install

Step 3 – Check Wine Version

Use the following command to check the version of wine installed on your system

On 32-Bit Systems:
wine --version

On 64-Bit Systems:
wine64 --version

How to Use Wine?

To use wine we need to login to the CentOS/Fedora desktop. After that Download a windows executable (.exe) file like PuTTY on your system and open it with Wine as below screenshot or use following command.

wine64 putty.exe