Since we don't want to duplicate a lot of information here, we
recommend to take a look at the official Wine
FAQ for general
information about how to use Wine. The following part will mainly
concentrate on the differences between Wine and Wine Staging.
Multiple Wine versions
It is absolutely no problem to have multiple versions of Wine installed
at the same time, for example regular system Wine located in
/usr/bin/wine and Wine Staging in /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine.
Nevertheless it can be confusing for beginners, so when you plan to use
Wine Staging as a replacement for system-Wine it might be useful to
install the wine-staging-compat compatibility symlinks package, which
allows to omit the /opt/wine-staging/bin/ part in all following
commandlines. Please refer to the installation instructions for more
details.
If you prefer to continue with multiple Wine versions, make sure to type
always the full path in order to select the right one. You can switch
between versions as often as you like - just make sure that all Windows
programs have terminated before starting them with a different version.
Running Wine Staging
To run Wine Staging without compatibility symlinks always type
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine, for example:
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/<your path>/
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine game.exe
You also have to add /opt/wine-staging/bin/ when running other wine
related programs, here are some additional examples:
# Initialize the wine prefix
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wineboot
# Open the wine configuration
/opt/wine-staging/bin/winecfg
# Run winepath to convert paths
/opt/wine-staging/bin/winepath --unix 'c:\Windows'
# Kill the running wineserver instance
/opt/wine-staging/bin/wineserver -k
Wineprefix
Unless you specify a special WINEPREFIX environment variable, Wine
Staging will use the same wineprefix ~/.wine (in your home directory)
like regular Wine. This allows you to use your already installed
programs directly, without much effort or re-installing them.