Help installing wine [duplicate]

Question

I'm new to ubuntu and I'm trying to download wine. I follow the instructions on the site and this message pops up in terminal:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 winehq-devel : Depends: wine-devel (= 1.9.15~ubuntu16.04.1)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I then tried using the command sudo apt-get install -f and got the message:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So obviously, nothing happened. If anyone knows any easier installation method or commands that can help, that would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

First try to purge/uninstall wine. From this answer you can do this with:

Delete configuration and other wine related files:

rm -r "$HOME/.wine"
rm  $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*
rm -r "$HOME/.local/share/applications/wine"
rm $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories/wine*
rm $HOME/.local/share/icons/????_*.xpm

Delete packages and clean your system:

sudo apt-get purge wine winehq-devel wine-devel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

After that you can reconfigure (see here for info) your packages to fix them if something is broken:

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a

Then you should be able to install wine properly. Keep in mind that staging and development versions may have bugs (that could theoretically even prevent proper installation). On the other hand I understand that you may need the latest version to play a game after last update.

Answer 2

If you're new to linux and want to use wine, I recommend you try PlayOnLinux first.

You can download the installer from their website.

https://www.playonlinux.com/

Or from the repository

sudo apt-get install playonlinux