How to install Wine 6.0 on Linux Mint 20.1

From time to time one needs to run a program, that was made for Windows – like a video game my son got (“Lego the Hobbit”), but one doesn’t want to run Windows at all. Still, this is possible with Linux thanks to the Wine project.

Problem

The problem is that repositories for Linux Mint / Ubuntu tend to offer quite old (outdated) version of Wine. For Linux Mint 19 it was version 3.x or 4.0 of Wine while the stable version claimed by Wine HQ at that time was 5.0. Now the stable version of Wine is 6.0 and Linux Mint 20.1 has only Wine 5.0 in its repositories. So to have newer version one has to install it in a little more complex way… like 7 bash commands. 🙂

Solution

Use these instructions, based on “Install Wine 6.0 in Ubuntu 20.04 & Linux Mint” article, but corrected and verified by myself on a fresh installation of Linux Mint 20.1 64-bit (with Cinammon). First execute following commands:

sudo apt-get install libgnutls30:i386 libldap-2.4-2:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libxml2:i386 libasound2-plugins:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key

Now there is a step which is depending on the version of Linux. The command below, with word “focal”, is for Linux Mint 20.x:

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main'

For Linux Mint 19.x you need to replace “focal” by “bionic” and for Linux Mint 18.x by “xenial”. For these older Linux Mint versions (19.x, 18.x) at this step you need to install “libfaudio0”: following the instruction from WineHQ this requires to download 2 files: libfaudio0_19.07-0_bionic_i386.deb and libfaudio0_19.07-0_bionic_amd64.deb and installing them with help of GDebi.

Then execute following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

And voila! The latest stable Wine is ready. I’ve verified the procedure on 2 computers, on Linux Mint 20.1 and Linux Mint 19.3.
The result: the above-mentioned video game was installed without problems from the original DVD and we were able to play it without issues. 🙂

P.S.

A month ago, in December 2020, it was precisely 10th anniversary of this blog! 😀 Wow! 10 years passed since my first blog post. Thanks for reading! 🙂