There are so many users who recently switched to Kali Linux from Windows, some of them and they want to run Windows programs and games in Kali Linux. So in our today's tutorial, we will describe how to run Windows programs and games in Kali Linux.
We can easily do this via wine. Wine is a program by using it we can run Windows programs in a Linux environment (Linux, macOS, & BSD). The full form of wine is Wine Is Not an Emulator. Really it is not an emulator or virtual machine, wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on the fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing us to cleanly integrate Windows applications into our desktop.
How to Install Wine in Kali Linux
In our Kali Linux system, we can install wine by simply using the following command:
sudo apt-get install wine
The following screenshot shows that we already have wine's latest version.
We can't run it now, we need another tool that is called wine-32. Wine-32 requires 32-bit packages but it is necessary to run the wine tool.
We can install wine32 by simply using the apt-get install command but first, we need to add 32-bit architecture in our machine. To do this we use the following command:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
After this, we need to update our system for the new architecture's repository by applying the following command:
sudo apt-get update
Then we can install wine32 in our system, so we run the apt-get command:
sudo apt-get install wine32
It may take some minutes depending on our internet speed and system performance. Then it will ask for restarting some libraries, we click here yes(Tab key might be useful). Then after completing the process we restart/reboot our PC.
Then we need to configure our wine to run Windows applications. To do that we open the wine configuration by applying the command:
winecfg
It will open the configuration window of wine. As shown in the following screenshot:
Here we can configure wine. We can set Windows versions, Libraries, Graphics, Audio, Drivers, Audio, etc, but for now, we leave these on default configuration.
Run Windows Application in Kali Linux
Now we are all set to run Windows applications and games in Kali Linux. We just need to type wine name-of-installer.exe in the terminal.
For example, we are going to install Notepad++ in our Kali Linux.
We need to open our terminal where the notepad++ setup file or exe file is stored (In our case it's in our /Downloads directory, as we can see the directory in the following screenshot) and type the following command:
wine npp.7.8.8.Installer.x64.exe
Then it will start its installing process and we can complete it as we do in Windows OS, as we can see in the following screenshot.
After completing installation during the funny next way (Windows installation process LMAO) we check on create desktop icon and we got a notepad++ icon on our desktop.
Now we can launch Notepad++ from directly our desktop. Isn't it really cool ??
We also can start it from Application Menu>Wine>Programs>Notepad++
Now if we want that we don't wanna use the terminal and we need to open every exe file through Wine directly. We just skip the terminal then we need to set the wine program loader as default for exe files. We need to create a symbolic link to it. To do it we use the following command:
sudo ln -s /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop /usr/share/applications
Then the link will be created, now we need to set it default for all exe files. To do so we right-click on any exe file and choose "open with another application".
Now we scroll down very lower (or we can press wine on our keyboard) to find "Wine Windows Program Loader". We need to select it and must check ✅ on the box "Use as default for this kind of file" as we did in the following screenshot:
Then we need to click on open. After this point, our system will open every exe file via Wine as default.
This is how we can install any application in Kali Linux such as Adobe Photoshop, and Microsoft Office. Nowadays we can run the latest versions of Windows programs in Linux even we can install Adobe Photoshop CS 2020. Wine creates file systems like Windows in our home directory but it is a hidden directory. Anyways we have opened it in the next screenshot.
Here we can see the file system is just like Windows. Wine creates an entire system like Windows that's why we can run Windows applications in Linux, not like virtual machine or emulator they creates another virtual system inside our system.
Additional Wine
Another tool is called "Winetricks", it helps us to install various Windows games, applications, DLL libraries, fonts, etc.
Let's install Winetricks by using the following command:
sudo apt-get install winetricks
This is a very small tool that should install in seconds.
After installing it we run this tool by using the following command:
winetricks
After this, the menu opens like the following screenshot:
From here we can easily install applications, games, and much more things.
Here is a wine tricks application list. We can see MS Office versions here. MS Office 2013 is available for direct download via Winetricks.
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