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Installing Wine on the Asus Eee

These instructions come from this blog entry. The EeeUser wiki has alternative instructions using the graphical user interface instead of text commands. Read both sets of instructions and use whichever you think you will find easier.

• Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window (black background, green or white text, a prompt saying something like /home/user).
• (If you are reading these instructions on the Eee itself and would prefer to copy-and-paste the codes from these instructions, type the command konsole and hit Enter. You'll get a similar-looking window but with a white background.)
• Your first task is to tell your computer about an additional source of installable software packages.
• Type: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list and hit Enter. (If you're asked for your password, enter it). A file will appear with some technical-looking lines in it.
• Use the arrow keys to go to the bottom of the text in the file.
• Type the following text exactly as written (or, if you have used konsole, copy it from here and paste it in):

  deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US/ stable/non-US main contrib non-free

• Press Ctrl+X to exit nano: when it asks you whether to save the changes, press Y and hit Enter.
• Now you need to get the computer to update its list of what packages are obtainable where.
• Type: sudo apt-get update and press Enter. A long list of messages will scroll past. If you get an error about not being able to find a GPG key for the non-US repository, don't worry: it doesn't seem to matter to the installation.
• Now you need to get the computer to install Wine.
• Type: sudo apt-get install wine and press Enter. You'll get various progress messages scrolling past, but you shouldn't get any error messages.
• Now you need to get your computer's list of software sources back to what it was before you started.
• Type: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list and press Enter.
• Go down to the two lines you added and type a hash character # at the start of each one. This makes them into comments, which apt-get will ignore, but it's better than deleting them will make it easier to resurrect them if you need to at a later date (you'd only need to remove the # instead of having to retype everything). The result should look like this:

  #deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
  #deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US/ stable/non-US main contrib non-free

• As before, press Ctrl+X followed by Y and Enter.
• As before, do apt-get update followed by Enter, so that the computer can update its internal list of packages and their sources.
• (If you opened konsole, you can close it now.)
• Close the terminal window.

Note: This procedure installs a relatively old version of Wine. Wine is constantly being updated, but we have not found a more recent distribution of it that works perfectly with the Eee. When we tried installing a more recent version of Wine from Wine HQ, we found that the Eee system didn't recognise .exe files properly, which led to all sorts of inconveniences.