Dedicated Server: Wine Compatibility Layer Linux Setup
This guide was created with the following products:
(Details may vary with products from different providers but the main concepts remain the same)
Introduction
Wine is an open-source compatibility layer for Linux which allows software that is originally developed for Windows to run on Linux systems. This is especially important for dedicated game servers that only offer Windows server files and may be required as a prerequisite for our other Linux dedicated game server guides. In this guide, we will explore the first-time setup process for installing Wine to your Linux server. We will be using Ubuntu in the examples, but the process should be very similar for other distributions.
Preparation
To begin with, connect to your Dedicated Server via SSH. Use our SSH Initial Access guide if you need help doing this.
Installing Wine
Begin the installation process by ensuring that the /etc/apt/keyrings/ directory exists, as this is necessary for Wine.
sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
Next, download and store the Wine GPG key into this directory which verifies that the package is authentic.
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
You will also have to save the sources list for WineHQ which can be done with the following pre-written command:
sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/$(lsb_release -is | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')/dists/$(lsb_release -cs)/winehq-$(lsb_release -cs).sources
Run the update command to ensure that your package changes are read and installed.
sudo apt update
Now you can proceed with the main step of downloading the latest version of Wine. This could take some time to complete.
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging
Finally, you need to install a few extra packages to ensure that Wine will work well with dedicated game server by running the following command.
sudo apt install cabextract winbind screen xvfb
Conclusion
You have now successfully setup the Wine comaptibility layer, which will allow you to run Windows programs on your Linux server. With this important prerequisite installed, you can now proceed to install dedicated game servers even if they are built for Windows.
We recommend checking out the other guides in this section which cover installing specific games through the use of SteamCMD and potentially Wine for Windows-based dedicated server files.