Usage

Using Wine Staging

Since we don't want to duplicate a lot of information here, we recommend to take a look at the official Wine FAQ for general information about how to use Wine. The following part will mainly concentrate on the differences between Wine and Wine Staging.

Multiple Wine versions

It is absolutely no problem to have multiple versions of Wine installed at the same time, for example regular system Wine located in /usr/bin/wine and Wine Staging in /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine. Nevertheless it can be confusing for beginners, so when you plan to use Wine Staging as a replacement for system-Wine it might be useful to install the wine-staging-compat compatibility symlinks package, which allows to omit the /opt/wine-staging/bin/ part in all following commandlines. Please refer to the installation instructions for more details.

If you prefer to continue with multiple Wine versions, make sure to type always the full path in order to select the right one. You can switch between versions as often as you like - just make sure that all Windows programs have terminated before starting them with a different version.

Running Wine Staging

To run Wine Staging without compatibility symlinks always type /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine, for example:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/<your path>/
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine game.exe

You also have to add /opt/wine-staging/bin/ when running other wine related programs, here are some additional examples:

# Initialize the wine prefix
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wineboot

# Open the wine configuration
/opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg

# Run winepath to convert paths
/opt/wine-staging/bin/winepath --unix 'c:\Windows'

# Kill the running wineserver instance
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wineserver -k

...

Wineprefix

Unless you specify a special WINEPREFIX environment variable, Wine Staging will use the same wineprefix ~/.wine (in your home directory) like regular Wine. This allows you to use your already installed programs directly, without much effort or re-installing them.