Change branch?

Questions about Wine on Linux
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16bituser
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Change branch?

Post by 16bituser »

Is there a recommended way of changing branch of installed wine?

I installed as recommended on https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu and selected the Stable branch. Installed it using apt install.
Now I am considering to try the Development branch. Is the recommended way to do apt remove stable before apt install development?

Would there be any problems with reverting back to stable using the same method?
jkfloris
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Re: Change branch?

Post by jkfloris »

Since the winehq-stable and winehq-devel packages cannot be installed together, apt will uninstall winehq-stable before installing winehq-devel. Note: Wine stable is not completely removed when Wine devel is installed. This is not necessary and makes it easy to switch between the branches.

However, it is recommended that you create a separate Wineprefix (fake Windows installation) for each Wine branch. The default Wineprefix is the hidden .wine folder in your home directory. You can rename this directory to something else. For example .wine-stable:

Code: Select all

mv ${HOME}/.wine ${HOME}/.wine-stable
When you run a program with wine after installing winehq-devel, a new Wineprefix will be created in .wine.

As updating to a newer version often works fine, you can also copy the prefix. As a result, all previously installed programs are also available in Wine devel.

Code: Select all

cp -r ${HOME}/.wine ${HOME}/.wine-stable
This way, it is also possible to continue using wine-stable. Instead of the wine command you should use

Code: Select all

WINEPREFIX=${HOME}/.wine-stable /opt/wine-stable/bin/wine program.exe
16bituser
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Re: Change branch?

Post by 16bituser »

Thanks!
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