Wine Installation Error – How to Fix Common Mistakes

wine

After the installation of wine-staging on 16.04, I pointed it at an executable and the installation process started. The installer asked a question about if I wanted to install Mono or Gecko. I thought I had missed a step, so I canceled out of the process, which was the mistake.

Now, if I try and install a windows app, it shows a dialog saying it needs a newer version. I've tried purging wine from the computer and reinstalling, but it ends up in the same spot, telling me I need a newer version. I'm guessing that a config file somewhere that I haven't purged that doesn't allow me to get back to the place in the process where wine asks me to install Mono or Gecko.

How can I fix this without reinstalling the whole operating system?

Best Answer

You probably haven't removed your per-user .wine folder.

If you want to reset Wine to the way it was before you ran it, the main thing to do is to remove or rename the Wine profile in your home directory. This is the .wine directory. You can show files and directories whose names start with . in most graphical file browsers (including Nautilus) by pressing Ctrl+H. (Pressing it again re-hides them.)

If you want rename that directory from the command line, you can open a Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run:

mv ~/.wine ~/.wine.old

That names it from .wine to .wine.old.

Or if you know you want to just remove it altogether:

cd
rm -r .wine

Please remember, however, that Windows applications run through Wine will usually default to saving documents in what they see as their C: drive, which is kept in that folder.

After your Wine profile is renamed or removed, Wine will re-create it automatically next time it runs.

You can probably fix this your underlying problem without actually starting from scratch, but since it sounds like you haven't done much with Wine yet, just removing or moving aside your Wine profile and starting over is likely the simplest solution.

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