Centos 6/RHEL install Wine

A short post on installing Wine on Centos 6/RHEL and other rpm based distros if you still need to use Windows apps and are not using any kind of Dual Boot or Virtual Machine set up as it can be helpful for the odd program from which you may want to use in Linux.

If you haven't yet installed Linux then you can install Centos 6 from a netinstall cd and configure a Fluxbox lightweight desktop with Thunar and Rxvt terminal. Alternatively you can use a distro or setup of your own.

Wine is in the Epel repo so make sure you have it installed with

$ sudo rpm –-import http://mirrors.coreix.net/fedora-epel/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.coreix.net/fedora-epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Install the package.

$ sudo yum install wine

Configure it.

$ winecfg

Brings up the config dialogue box where you can check paths to folders, sound, graphics etc and add programs.

It will also ask to install a gecko file, so allow this also.

To add a program first go to the .wine hidden folder in your home directory and load the exe into the program files directory there.

Then open up winecfg and click the 'add application' button and browse to it.

You can also click on the exe and install it that way into the program files directory, again within the .wine hidden folder.

The most common method for standard .exe installation files is to right click and select 'open with Wine Windows Program Loader' and allow the program to 'install' into the Program Files directory within .wine folder as if using a virtual machine.
Once you've 'installed' it you can remove the original .exe file.
Some .exe files run in 'Wine Windows Program Loader' without installation.

There are various options depending which kind of file you are using and whether it needs to be installed or will run directly.

You can send a shortcut to the Desktop so you can run the program without running wine, do this by browsing to the program files directory in the .wine hidden folder,right clicking and sending to desktop.

Sometimes, a program won't run from the Desktop shortcut, in which case you would just browse to it in the hidden .wine folder and run it from there.

Now you can use the odd Windows program or some of the portable apps which are available to download.(See below)

On encoding media files, if you download zConvert for Windows and install it on Wine (change install path to 'C:\Program Files\zConvert') you can encode media files to a variety of formats and play them on a wide range of devices.(Put them in the /home/<user>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/zConvert directory for best results)

(For video encoders which work well natively check out Transcoder Arista and Avidemux)


Another trick you can use is to download the free apps from
http://www.lupopensuite.com/, and copy the apps you want from the apps folder to put them into wine on Linux.

Lupo apps which work in wine are FastStone PhotoResizer/Capture/Image-Viewer, Infanview, OperaUSB, AbiWord Portable, OikoCssEditor, PDF-Exchange Viewer, Universal Extractor and others. Also 7zip, which is handy for extracting iso files as well as standard zip files.

See Fluxbox key bindings for more. 

Generally, Wine runs very well on Centos/RHEL and is probably easier to use than on Ubuntu.

One thing you have to remember is that wine installs pulse audio, so if you prefer alsa you have some extra configuration to do, or remove pulse altogether as you don't actually need it for wine.

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