Ubuntu – Why is Wine not installable on the system

12.10package-managementwine

I upgraded on a fresh install to Ubuntu 12.10, and I've tried installing wine many times, but I always get this:

This error could be caused by required additional software packages which are missing or not installable. 
Furthermore there could be a conflict between software packages which are not allowed to be installed at the same time.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:

wine:

It won't let me install the dependencies either it says it needs another set of dependencies to install them. Using Asus KJ50 64bit OS, dual boot with Windows 7

sudo apt-get install wine1.5
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:
 wine1.5 : Depends: wine1.5-i386 (= 1.5.15-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable
           Recommends: gnome-exe-thumbnailer but it is not going to be installed or
                       kde-runtime but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: ttf-droid
           Recommends: ttf-mscorefonts-installer but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: ttf-umefont but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: ttf-unfonts-core but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: winbind but it is not going to be installed
           Recommends: winetricks but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Best Answer

I've been having the same issue, it turns out that with newer versions of apt and dpkg they support a feature called "Multi-arch". In simple terms, you can specify that apt pulls package info from repositories for architectures other than the native install, and install multiarch compatible packages from those repos. For more detailed information, see: http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO

Your issue specifically, is that the wine1.5-i386 is in the 32 bit wine repository, but not in the 64 bit repo, and your dpkg/apt are not configured to deal with this for some reason. To resolve:

Check your native architecture with:

sudo dpkg --print-architecture #in your case this should return 'amd64'

Other available architectures can be shown by:

sudo dpkg --print-foreign-architectures #in your case this should not return anything

So you need to configure a new foreign architecture (quantal/12.10 or newer***):

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Check your new arch is now available, update and install your package with apt:

sudo dpkg --print-foreign-architectures #now this should return 'i386'
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install wine1.5 #and away you go!

=======

***Note that the Ubuntu dpkg in natty (1.16.0~ubuntu7 (reports 1.15.8.10)), oneiric and precise (1.16.1.2ubuntu7) uses a different syntax:*

echo "foreign-architecture i386" > /etc/dpkg.cfg.d/architectures
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