How To Install Wine on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wine on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Wine is a free, open-source program that allows Linux users for running Windows-based applications or software on any Unix environment. As its name suggests Wine is not an emulator, but a runtime environment that ensures compatibility with Windows. It provides Windows programs a compatibility layer to work without actually having Win OS.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of WineHQ on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Wine on Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget software-properties-common apt-transport-https

Step 2. Enable 32-Bit Packages Support.

Identify if your system is 32-bit or 64-bit correctly. To do this, run the lscpu command:

lscpu

Next, enable i386 architecture using the following command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Step 3. Installing Wine on Debian 11.

By default, Wine is not available to install directly from the Debian 11 base repository. Now run the following command to add Wine repository to your Debian 11 system:

sudo sh -c 'echo " deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ bullseye main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wine.list'

Next, import the GPG key:

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key

Finally, run the following command below to install the Wine:

### Wine For Stable version ###
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

### Wine For Development version ###
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel

### Wine For Staging version ###
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging

You can confirm your Wine version to verify installation and build using the following command:

wine --version

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Wine. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of WineHQ on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Wine website.