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Chapter 2. Getting Wine

2.1. The Many Forms of Wine

The standard Wine distribution includes quite a few different executables,
libraries, and configuration files. All of these must be set up properly for
Wine to work well. This chapter will guide you through the necessary steps to
get Wine installed on your system.

If you are running a distribution of Linux that uses packages to keep track of
installed software, you may be in luck: A prepackaged version of Wine may
already exist for your system. The first three sections will tell you how to
find the latest Wine packages and get them installed. You should be careful,
though, about mixing packages between different distributions, and even from
different versions of the same distribution. Often a package will only work on
the distribution it's compiled for. We'll cover Debian, Redhat, and other
distributions.

If you're not lucky enough to have an available package for your operating
system, or if you'd prefer a newer version of Wine than already exists as a
package, you may have to download the Wine source code and compile it yourself
on your own machine. Don't worry, it's not too hard to do this, especially with
the many helpful tools that come with Wine. You don't need any programming
experience to compile and install Wine, although it might be nice to have some
minor UNIX administrative skill. We'll cover how to retrieve and compile the
official source releases from the FTP archives, and also how to get the cutting
edge up-to-the-minute fresh Wine source code from CVS (Concurrent Versions
System). Both processes of source code installation are similar, and once you
master one, you should have no trouble dealing with the other one.

Finally, you may someday need to know how to apply a source code patch to your
version of Wine. Perhaps you've uncovered a bug in Wine, reported it to the 
Wine mailing list, and received a patch from a developer to hopefully fix the
bug. The last section in this chapter will show you how to safely apply the
patch and revert it if the patch doesn't work.

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