How to Setup Wine in a Debian System
Wine Is Not an Emulator
Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on Linux. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.
Wine is under active development and millions of people are estimated to use Wine to run their Windows software.
As indicated in the wine64-bin helper package, it is necessary to enable multiarch in order to be able to install and run the 32-bit wine packages:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine:i386 libwine-cms:i386
Be very careful as spaces matter above.
Winetricks is a gui script that can be used to install some windows applications on linux to be used with wine. It needs the zenity library to run. The zenity library allows to create gtk based gui dialogs from the command line or bash scripts:
apt-get install zenity
The script Winetricks is maintained by DanKegel at http://winetricks.org. The latest release is available at http://winetricks.org/winetricks. Right-click on that link and use 'Save As' to save a fresh copy. Or you can get it from the commandline with the command:
wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
And make it executable with chmod
chmod +x winetricks
Now run winetricks
./winetricks
It will popup a dialog box with instructions. Follow the instructions and install the application you like.
Winetricks may also be used from the command line. For instance to improve font rendering in some windows programs you type:
winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb
We use Winetricks also in the following sections.
To install Adobe AIR successfully, we need first to get a lot of packages. Prepare a cup of coffee and go for the following:
winetricks wininet
winetricks ie7
winetricks corefonts tahoma comctl32 comctl32ocx gecko gdiplus mdac28 msls31 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 riched20 riched30
winetricks vcrun2008
After installing all these components you can reboot Wine with:
wineboot -k
Now we are ready to install Adobe AIR 2.6winetricks adobeair wineboot -k
Adobe AIR is needed to install a program called "Weeras". Some teachers use Weeras to manage and show digital content such as textbooks. Once Adobe AIR is working in the system, if you need to install Weeras, you just double click in the file "WeerasLinux.air" and the installation process will start.
Install all the packages needed for Adobe AIR (see section 3). Adobe AIR itself is not needed. Then you can get Amazon's Kindle for PC in Amazon's web page. I installed myself the version 1.10.8 (current version in 2014) with no problem.