Install Wine 6 on Debian 10

Wine 6.0 has just been released! Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine 6 on Debian 10.  Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a program which allows running Microsoft Windows programs (including DOS, Windows 3.x, Win32, and Win64 executables) on Unix. It consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft Windows binary, and a library (called Winelib) that implements Windows API calls using their Unix, X11 or Mac equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Windows code into native Unix executables.

According to Wine announcement page, Wine 6.0 is now available. It comes with quite a number of bug fixes that you can read about on on the change log page.

Installing Wine 6 on Debian 10

Install Official Wine Repository

Wine is provided by the default Debian main repos. However, Wine 4.0 is the latest available version;

apt-cache policy wine

wine:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.0-2
  Version table:
     4.0-2 500
        500 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages

In order to be able to install Wine 6, you need to install the Official Wine repository as shown below;

Install Wine repository signing key.

wget -qO - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo apt-key add -

Install the repositories;

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ buster main'

Install OBS Faudio Repository

 The wine-stable packages will also require FAudio libraries. Hence, run the command below to install OBS Faudio repository;

wget -O- -q https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/Debian_10/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/Debian_10 ./'

Enable 32-bit System Support on Debian 10

In order to be able to run 32-bit Windows applications, you need to enable 32-bit architecture on 64-bit systems.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Update the package cache;

apt update

To verify the enablement of the 32-bit architecture support;

dpkg --print-foreign-architectures

i386

Installing Wine 6

You can now install Wine by running the command below;

apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

Verify Wine Installation

Run the command below to check installed WIne version as a way to verify its installation;

wine --version

wine-6.0

Reboot System

You can now run system reboot to ensure that Wine environment is setup;

systemctl reboot

Run Windows Applications on Debian 10 using Wine

You can then run Windows applications on Debian 10 using Wine, for example, to run Putty (as a standard, non-root user);

wine putty.exe

If prompted to install Wine Mono/Gecko, click install and proceed.

You can now use Wine 6 on Debian 10 to run other apps as you so wish.

Further Reading

WineHQ Wiki

Other Tutorials

Install Wine 6 on Ubuntu 20.04

Install Wine 4 on CentOS 8

How to Install Wine 4.0 on Debian 9.8