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I downloaded the wine-1.4-rc5.tar.bz2. I ran the tools/wineinstall in terminal. After some time I get this error.

checking for X... no configure: error: X development files not found.
Wine will be built without X support, which probably isn't what you
want. You will need to install development packages of Xlib/Xfree86 at
the very least. Use the --without-x option if you really want this.

Configure failed, aborting install.

The installation won't finish. Can I fix this and make Wine install ?

5
  • Do you want compile wine? Why?
    – BuZZ-dEE
    Sep 16, 2012 at 15:51
  • @Eliah "wine1.3 / 1.4-0ubuntu1~ppa1~lucid1", wine1.3 is wine 1.4 in the lucid ppa?
    – BuZZ-dEE
    Sep 16, 2012 at 16:22
  • 2
    @BuZZ-dEE You're right, it is--the version number, and contents of the VERSION file in the upstream source archive linked to from the PPA page, confirm this. Subin, I recommend following BuZZ-dEE's advice unless you have specific needs that require you to compile from source. If BuZZ-dEE's answer does turn out to be the one that helps you the most--which I suspect it will--then I recommend unaccepting my answer and accepting BuZZ-dEE's. Sep 16, 2012 at 17:01
  • 1
    re: Do you want compile wine? Why? ..... ahhh the internuts! What difference does it make? How's about the fact that many binaries seem to have things left out that create errors or otherwise impede the desired use of wine, and when you go to get help people's first response is "well gee dummy, why don't you recompile wine?" facepalm
    – Scott
    Jan 5, 2017 at 21:01
  • 1
    (you'll have to excuse me, but I just came through a series of condescending thread responses where people were telling a beginner to recompile --with-png because the default wine on some distros is compiled --without-png and this causes errors when trying to install windows software in many cases. Only to see this one asking "why compile?" How's about simply 'because he wants to?' Why is it relevant 'why'? Anyone that works with wine knows it's tendencies to fail to support this-or-that based on how it's built to begin with.
    – Scott
    Jan 5, 2017 at 21:07

3 Answers 3

18

Most people should either install Wine through Ubuntu's official repositories, or using the Wine project's official Wine PPA.

However, if you want to build and install Wine from source, you should be able to do so.

  • This may make sense if you want to install a later version of Wine than is provided for your Ubuntu release. However, as BuZZ-dEE has pointed out, although there is no wine1.4 package for Ubuntu 10.04 in the official PPA, the wine1.3 package actually provides version 1.4. (This is indicated by the complete version number--1.4-0ubuntu1~ppa1~lucid1--and can be verified by looking in the file called VERSION in the wine1.3_1.4.orig.tar.gz file linked here.)

    Therefore, Buzz-dEE's answer is god advice; I recommend you just use that package, unless you have specific needs that require your to compile from source. (Or you want to use the unstable 1.5 version, which is not provided for Lucid.)

    However, if for any reason you wish to build from source, please read on.

You will need the development packages that provide header files for the libraries it uses. That's the cause of the error message you're getting.

To resolve this particular error, you'll need the package called libx11-dev.

-dev packages provide header files. libx11-dev is not the only such package you'll need, to compile Wine from source. I recommend taking a look at the build dependencies for the development version of Wine in Ubuntu. (Scroll down to where it says "Build dependencies.") That should give you a good idea of which -dev packages you'll need to install, for Wine to be able to compile.

If you use 64bit version of Ubuntu, this error message may appear if you're trying to compile 32bit wine, so you'll need some 32bit libraries to do it: libx11-dev:i386 and libfreetype6-dev:i386

0
14

If you have the source repositories enabled, you would have more luck if you use:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

It installs all the dependencies of Wine. If you only need to solve the X error:

sudo apt-get install xorg-dev libx11-dev
7

I had the same problem. Do this:

sudo apt install libx11-dev:i386

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