Ubuntu – Can’t install wine from winehq.org on Ubuntu (actually Lubuntu) 18.04 LTS

I have followed all the instructions on the winehq page. In particular, I have run the following commands:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'

The first three of the above seemed to work fine. However, the last command gives me the following error:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 winehq-stable : Depends: wine-stable (= 5.0.0~bionic)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I'm running Lubuntu 18.04.3 on a USB live stick. (However, if I remember correctly, a couple days ago I got the exact same error on a normal hard disk Lubuntu 18.04.3 installation.)

I've read that a lot of people get similar errors. Unfortunately I haven't found any solutions online that worked.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone. I'll try them out later today.

In the mean time, here's something I don't understand. Ubuntu 18.04 has been around for almost two years now. In all that time, surely somebody has successfully installed wine, right? What did they do to get it working?

Analysis

The WineHQ repository misses the dependencies for wine-stable package.
I have reported a bug 48513 to WineHQ bugzilla.

^{The main problem here is bad documentation, which is written in non-reproducible way.

The Rosanne DiMesio's main idea is "People who don't bother to read the directions are always going to have problems.".}

So we need to write our own documentation until WineHQ-officials become smarter.

The problem with dependencies was caused by the FAudio dependency, which is not contained in Debian/Ubuntu and WineHQ repositories. We can determine the exact package name by using command below and analyzing of their output:

$ sudo apt-get install wine-stable-amd64 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: wine-stable-amd64 : Depends: libfaudio0 but it is not installable Recommends: libcapi20-3 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libodbc1 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libosmesa6 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libsdl2-2.0-0 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The aforementioned libfaudio0 package is available only for Ubuntu 19.10 and upcoming 20.04 LTS.

Solution

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt update

Note: if you have WineHQ repository added - remove it with

sudo apt-add-repository -r 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'

to prevent the mess of repositories and then proceed.

wget -q https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/xUbuntu_18.04/Release.key -O Release.key -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/xUbuntu_18.04/ ./' sudo apt-get update

and only after this install one of WineHQ packages:

# Stable branch sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable #Development branch #sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel #Staging branch #sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging

Best Answer

Analysis

Solution