Windows Applications can be made to run on your Ubuntu system using Wine. You can install Wine directly from Ubuntu Software Center. But before proceeding, you must check if Wine in installed on your system already.
Wine is a software package that allows applications made for Microsoft Windows platform to run on UNIX like operating systems like LINUX. Wine also provides a software library named WineLib, using which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.
Today, Ubuntu has become so popular that it is giving though competition to Windows and MAC operating systems. Developers have started giving Ubuntu equal priority to Windows and MAC. So, you can find almost every app made for Windows OS for Ubuntu or even if you can't find the same application, you can still find equally capable alternatives.
But, still there are incidents when you want to run the same Windows application on your Ubuntu system, like running FOOBAR2000 on Ubuntu. In such situation Wine comes into play. For eg, Wine makes it possible to run IPmessenger on Ubuntu and even allows running IDM on ubuntu.
So, enough of benefits of Wine. Lets start talking about installing Wine. You can install Wine from the Ubuntu Software Center and you are done. For detailed description you can check out our tutorial on Installing Wine Correctly and Completely on Ubuntu.
But before you install Wine on your system, you must check if Wine is already installed on your system. By checking, you can save yourself from unrequired effort and also save your bandwidth.
Checking if Wine installed on Ubuntu
Option 1
- Open terminal (ctrl + alt + t)
- Type Wine and hit enter
- If you see any error message then Wine is not installed and If you see usage options, then Wine is installed on your system.
Option 2 - Checking version
- Open terminal (ctrl + alt + t)
- Type Wine --version and hit enter
- If you see any error message then Wine is not installed and If you get message like Wine-1.7.19, then Wine is installed on your system.
So, using the first options given above you check if Wine is installed on your system or not and using option two you can check the version of Wine installed (if any). After this, you can either install Wine or upgrade Wine to latest version as per your preference.