MacOS – installing older version of wine on Mavericks from tar.bz2 file

macoswine

I remember that a program I desperately need to use stopped working after I updated wine. The last version I remember it worked perfectly on is the very version 1.5.8, which I have downloaded from here: http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.5.8 as a tar.bz2 file.

After all the struggles I have gone through trying to successfully install this specific release of wine (1.5.8) I have given up and decided to turn to this site for help.

I always installed and managed wine via MacPorts but this time it will not be possible since MacPorts doesn't allow me to install older versions of wine. I would like to ask you please if anyone could help me and tell me (explain) how to install this particular version of wine from that tar.bz2 file.

I'm using OS X 10.9, Mavericks. The program I'm trying to run is Lingea Lexicon 5 but it's not really important, I remember it worked perfectly on 1.5.8 but it doesn't on the current release 1.6.2, it crashes at start.

Please bear in mind that I'm not an experienced user of Terminal, I can do some basic things but my knowledge of commands is limited. Thank you again.

Best Answer

MacPorts

It is possible to install older editions of software using MacPorts. The following article explains how, How to install an older version of a port.

The example given by the article using this notation for the tcl package:

sudo port activate tcl @8.4.16_0

Try this for the wine package:

sudo port activate wine @1.5.8

HomeBrew

Alternatively, consider installing using the HomeBrew project. This article by David Baumgold walks through the steps required, Installing Wine on Mac OS X.

brew is also able to install a specific version of a package, see Homebrew install specific version of formula?

tar.bz2

If you want to manually install wine from the downloaded tar.bz2 source, follow the steps in Wine User Guide: 2.3. Installing Wine from source.

This approach will require installing the Xcode command line tools and dealing with dependencies. Because of this, I highly recommend using brew or another pre-built package approach.

osxwinebuilder

An open source project called osxwinebuilder attempts to ease the process of building wine from source. This project may be helpful as it claims:

The goal of this project is to provide easy-to-use scripts for cleanly building and installing Wine and its prerequisite software into a self-contained directory hierarchy on Mac OS X.

Emulators

If you encounter problems compiling from source, consider using a PC emulator such as VMware Fusion, Parallels, or Virtual Box. All these can run Windows on your Mac and thus run Lingea Lexicon 5 for you. In addition, VMware Fusion and Parallels both offer commercial support should you encounter problems.

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