Install Wine on Debian 11

Wine 7.x has just been released! Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine on Debian 11. Wine 7 is the current stable release as of this writing, hence this guide is about how to install 7.x on Debian 11. 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.

Install Wine on Debian 11

Install Official Wine Repository

Wine is provided by the default Debian main repos. However, Wine 5.0 is the latest available version;

apt-cache policy wine

wine:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 5.0.3-3
  Version table:
     5.0.3-3 500
        500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
     4.0-2 500
        500 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages

In order to be able to install Wine 7.x on Debian 11, 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 | gpg --dearmor > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/wine.gpg

Install the repositories;

echo 'deb http://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ bullseye main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wine.list

Enable 32-bit System Support on Debian 11

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

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