Wine not being given proper permissions?

Question

After updating to Ubuntu 22.04 wine stopped working. I noticed some other things I did not like about Ubuntu so I went over to Debian 12. Wine still did not work. I asked in the wine forums but no one could help me. Been searching around and asking some individuals for help, but nothing worked, not even "wine managers" like PlayOnLinux or Soda would start wine(cfg).

However, I just decided to try the heinous act of running sudo winecfg and I finally got a GUI! This got me thinking that maybe the latest versions of these distros have some added security and wine is not getting the permission to draw a GUI. CLI execs worked regardless and so did winetricks.

If you are wanting to see logs, they are a mile long. You can look in that wine forum post to see the steps I have gone through and the details of the errors (even if they are from Ubuntu I got practically the same errors in Debian). If there are any logs or command lines outside of those I should try I can post their output here (or link off if also miles long).

My fstab looks like this:

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=50617566-677d-4f2d-b278-bd97d99a2cfe /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /home was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=3225b130-04f8-4190-a9e1-f3ebe5efafc8 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=4f79f2b8-b0ee-46fc-be22-2c477a42dbb3 none            swap    sw              0       0
# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=54953a73-dc85-4ad8-96ae-6aa7e3bea622 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

# Win Parts
# /dev/sda2 C:\
UUID=A03A04FA3A04CF6A /media/sda2     ntfs-3g    exec,permissions,auto  0       0
# /dev/sda8 E:\
UUID=078A40594387992A /media/sda8     ntfs-3g    exec,permissions,auto  0       0
# /dev/sdb7 H:\
UUID=18F7C0FB55E53731 /media/sdb7     ntfs-3g    exec,permissions,auto  0       0

And my .wine folder that sits in home should have the correct permissions:

drwxrwxr-x 131 edward edward   36864 Jun 24 10:13 .
drwxrwxr-x   2 edward edward    4096 Jun 24 09:53 dosdevices
drwxrwxr-x   7 edward edward    4096 Aug 17  2022 drive_c
-rw-r--r--   1 edward edward 7455694 Jun 24 09:55 system.reg
-rw-rw-r--   1 edward edward      12 Apr 14 09:34 .update-timestamp
-rw-r--r--   1 edward edward    3288 Jun 24 09:53 userdef.reg
-rw-r--r--   1 edward edward  527805 Jun 24 09:53 user.reg
-rw-rw-r--   1 edward edward     457 Nov  6  2022 winetricks.log

What's my next step from here?

Answer 1

My personal preference is to get wine directly from the source, rather than wait for Ubuntu or Debian to update their version. Caveat: This does require trusting wine as PPA, which I do on a home PC... but perhaps not in a commercial environment. Use Terminal for the following.

1. Uninstall wine as distributed by Debian.

   sudo apt purge wine64
   sudo apt purge wine32
   sudo apt autoremove
   

2. Add wine headquarters as PPA and add its repository.

   sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386'
   sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings 
   sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key 
   

3. Get the wine files.

   sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/dists/bookworm/winehq-bookworm.sources 
   

4. Install wine from files.

   sudo apt update 
   sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable 
   

Now test wine with a a Windows application, such as IrfanView or 7_Zip.

N.B. The first time a new version of wine is run, it takes some time to configure itself. It may request adding an extension, such as Mono for Windows DotNet apps. Be patient for that first run, and, afterwards, wine apps start quickly (faster than Snap apps, on my PC's).