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Setup of winestart

  • Download winestart, and stick it someplace.
  • Open it in a text editor, and find where $w::wine_prefix is defined. Change this to wherever you want to install your wine versions. (I will be using /opt/wine in these instructions. Note that the location must be able to handle a GB or two.)
  • Make sure it is executable, and move it to /usr/bin. (or someplace else in your path.) Test with ./winestart.pl --help
  • Download a source version of wine. Sourceforge has the most recent versions, but for old ones, I recommend Ibibio.org.
  • Unzip the version of wine that you downloaded someplace out of the way.
  • Run ./configure with the -prefix option set to the base wine directory that you picked earlier, with the wine version number included. As an example: ./configure -prefix=/opt/wine/wine-20050725. This is done so that winestart can access the version properly.
  • Run make depend && make. (This will take a while.)
  • If you aren't going to be doing any debugging, find and delete all *.o files inside the wine directory. (This frees up a few hundred MB.)
  • Copy the wine directory to wherever you set -prefix to. (For example, /opt/wine/wine-20050725/wine should now exist. To check your work, run winestart.pl --get-wine-versions, then ./winestart.pl --wine-version 20050725 --program winemine)
  • If you plan to use a version extensively, you may want to create a shell script to automate running a certain wine version. For example, creating a shellscript called wine20050725 that contains:
    • #!/bin/sh
    winestart.pl --wine-version 20050725 --program "$@"
    then running programs like wine20050725 winemine