How-To: Change the Wine Theme to Something More Appealing

Notice: I tested this tutorial using Wine 1.1.17, but it should work successfully on previous versions too.

By default, Windows applications which run through Wine don't look very well, since that's the look and feel of Windows 98 at best, to mention nothing about XP:


So what follows are a few easy steps which will allow to change the way applications ran through Wine look like. If you need guidance for installing Wine, here are two tutorials I recently wrote, for Ubuntu 8.04 here and here, and for Debian Lenny here. These should also work in Ubuntu 8.10 (and the upcoming 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) and the latest Wine release.

1. Download some MS styles from deviantART
First, you will need to get some themes from here. For my example I will be using VistaPerfection X4 (direct download link). After saving it, uncompress the ZIP file and copy the .msstyles file (in our example the file is called VistaPerfection.msstyles) in a location of your choice.

2. Run winecfg and install the theme
Next, run the Wine configuration utility, winecfg, and under the Desktop Integration tab, click the Install theme... button, then navigate to where your .msstyles file is located and select it.

Select the .msstyles file for installation

Now under the Theme drop-down menu, select the VistaPerfection X4 theme and then click OK. This should be all and the new theme should be now installed. Notice that you can still configure the colors if you don't like the default ones.

The look of Wine applications with VistaPerfection X4

Running Notepad

The VistaX theme

Notice: I bumped into this short tutorial in a post on UbuntuForums, here.

How-To: Install the Latest Wine Release in Debian Lenny

Debian Lenny comes with Wine 1.0.1 included in the repositories, which is the stable release of Wine, but it is also a little outdated. Here are a few easy steps for compiling and installing the latest Wine release from source in Debian Lenny. This tutorial should work for the latest Wine release (at the time of writing, the last release is 1.1.17).


1. Install the tools needed for the compilation
Type in a terminal as root:

apt-get install build-essential

2. Install the development libraries needed by Wine
To install the necessary dependencies, first make sure that you have the sources repositories enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. To do this, you should have a line which starts with deb-src, e.g.:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

Next, update the packages list:

apt-get update

And then install the dependencies:

apt-get build-dep wine

This will take a while, depending on the speed of your Internet connection.

3. Download the source tarball
Get the source tarball for the latest release from the official website, then uncompress it. For example, for Wine 1.1.17 you would issue the following command in the directory where you saved it:

tar -xjf wine-1.1.17.tar.bz2

Next, change the current working directory to wine-1.1.17 and proceed to the next step.

4. Compile and install Wine
You can either do:

./configure
make depend && make
make install

The last one as root. Or you can use their script located in the tools/ directory, wineinstall:

./tools/wineinstall
make install

If you want to install Wine as normal user change the prefix to, say, /home/USER/usr:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make depend && make
make install

And make sure to include /home/USER/usr/bin in your $PATH.

Next configure Wine by typing winecfg as normal user and run Windows applications like this:

wine application_name.exe

Make sure to keep the directory wine-1.1.17, so in case you need to uninstall Wine, you will only have to issue the following command from inside that directory:

make uninstall


Alternate way to install Wine: using the WineHQ repository
To set up Wine from the WineHQ repository you will need to follow this simple tutorial, provided on the Wine homepage. To sum it up:

Remove your existing Wine installation as root:

apt-get remove wine

Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.lamaresh.net/apt lenny main

Add the GPG key:

wget -O - http://www.lamaresh.net/apt/key.gpg | apt-key add -

Issue the following two commands:

apt-get update && apt-get install wine

This should do it too.

Updated: March 31, 2009