How do I compile Wine from the source tarball?

[Game_boy]

Wine packages for Ubuntu 7.10 sometimes take a week to appear and then the server crashes for the next one or two under the stress of auto-updaters requesting it.

If I download the source package from the Wine website, how do I compile it? All the guides don't say how to use the generic source package. I have no experience in compiling applications, so if possible I would like step-by-step commands on how to do everything between downloading it and getting the final .deb packages.

[Malikith]

Before you compile, you need to make sure you fulfill the dependencies so type

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

It should install all the dependencies for Wine at that point so you are now ready to compile the source.

So basically, just extract it, go open up a terminal and go to where you extracted it, so if you extracted it inside your home directory, it would be /home/yourname/wine-0.9.50 or something like that.

Once inside the wine-0.9.50 directory, just type ./tools/wineinstall and it should start the configure script, during the process of compiling, you will get some yes/no prompts just read them and say yes and do what they tell you. Compiling Wine may take up to a half an hour to compile depending on your CPU.

If you have any more questions or if I wasn't clear enough on something, be free to ask.

[Game_boy]

What does it mean when it doesn't find something? There were lots of things like "lib-something-or-other .... no". Will this negatively affect the package?

Oh, and how do I uninstall and upgrade if necessary? It didn't make .deb files (obviously) so how do I manage it?

[Malikith]

What does it mean when it doesn't find something? There were lots of things like "lib-something-or-other .... no". Will this negatively affect the package?

Oh, and how do I uninstall and upgrade if necessary? It didn't make .deb files (obviously) so how do I manage it?

Unfortunately with this route, managing the it isn't as easy as 123, to be able to uninstall it, you need to go back into the wine source directory you extracted and type sudo make uninstall

Upgrading through this route would consist of downloading say Wine 0.9.51 and going into the source directory and typing sudo make uninstall . Once uninstalled you would continue with ./tools/wineinstall

And the things that say no that you mentioned, I wouldn't really worry about them. It shouldn't have a negative impact since you already have the same dependencies installed as the official package since you did a sudo apt-get build-dep wine.

Of course if you want to try and create deb packages from the source for easier management, you can try this, but I haven't tested this with Wine:

http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2006/08/16/Building-deb-package-from-source

Either that, or if you want it to just be automagic, I would advise just waiting for the new Wine release to show up in the repositories.

[Game_boy]

Thanks for your help. I don't mind doing the uninstall thing; I thought it was going to be manual search-and-delete.

[Thetargos]

I thought in Debian based distributions it was actually fairly easy to build .debs? Because another route would be to see how the "official" wine is built and build your own .deb, with .rpms is easy (but you need to download the source-code twice, one for the tarball, and the other for the .src.rpm to extract the .spec and any other patches, then it is a matter of building the .spec into an .rpm and installing that.)

[Kano]

It is indeed easy, I update the winehq deb packages usually the same day new wine release is out. You basically only increase the version number and can reuse the old debian dir. In the Kanotix Thorhammer repository is usually always the latest wine.

[Malikith]

Oh I totally forgot about something.. Theres a very easy way to making a deb package out of the wine source you compiled. Make sure you do a sudo make uninstall in the wine source directory before you do this to make sure wine isn't installed anymore.

You can use checkinstall to do it, I totally forgot about checkinstall. You can get check install by typing sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Once checkinstall is in, since you already have wine compiled, you can just type sudo checkinstall within the wine source directory and it will build the package for you. It'll ask you some questions but you can skip them by just hitting enter since all the values should be good.

Once the package is built it should install it for you since you're doing it with sudo. The package will be in the wine source directory as wine_0.9.50-1_i386.deb for example.

So when a new version of wine comes out, you can simply remove the package any method you wish, synaptic, or sudo apt-get remove wine. Then compile the wine source not with the ./tools/wineinstall but instead just do:

./configure && make

Once done compiling:

sudo checkinstall

This method should work with pretty much any source tarball you run into. If you don't want it to install the deb package with checkinstall after it builds the deb package for whatever reason, just don't do it in sudo and ignore the error message at the end about installation.

[Thetargos]

Why would you uninstall a package before installing a new one, couldn't you just "update" the installed package?

[Game_boy]

Why would you uninstall a package before installing a new one, couldn't you just "update" the installed package?

Because I'm not using a package format - I'm compiling from source. There are packages availible, but take a week to come out with the project being on a two-week release cycle.