Wine builds packed into portable executables
The project is deprecated in favor of another my project Conty, which is basically a much improved and extended version of this project.
Conty not only allows to run Wine without any dependecies installed, but also allows to run anything else. Take a look, if you are interested.
https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty
This project allows you to pack Wine and almost all of its required libraries into a single portable executable that should work on most Linux distributions. This project uses SquashFS as the container for Wine and its libraries (similar to what AppImage does).
What are the benefits compared to regular Wine builds? The main benefit is that fewer libraries need to be installed. Another benefit is that SquashFS supports fast compression algorithms (such as lz4 or zstd), so Wine can launch faster and use less disk space.
This is the structure of the portable executables generated (from the beginning to the end of the file):
First of all, FUSE is required.
Despite that most required libraries are included into the squashfs image, some libraries still need to be installed. This is the list of libraries that need to be installed:
Here are optional libraries that may be required for some applications:
It's important to install both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of these libraries.
GLIBC 2.27 or newer is required as the runtime is from Ubuntu 18.04.
You can download ready-to-use portable Wine/Proton executables from the releases page.
Root rights are not required!
Make the script executable and run it. For example:
chmod +x wine-portable-5.x-staging-amd64.sh
./wine-portable-5.x-staging-amd64.sh application.exe
To run winecfg (you can run regedit the same way):
./wine-portable-5.x-staging-amd64.sh winecfg
You can also use the built-in winetricks to install dlls and other components. For example, the command below will install dxvk and d3dcompiler_47:
./wine-portable-5.x-staging-amd64.sh winetricks dxvk d3dcompiler_47
For testing purposes or if installing libraries is not a problem for you (but you like SquashFS and the idea of a single Wine executable), you can disable the included libraries (runtime), in which case Wine will use only system libraries:
export DISABLE_RUNTIME=1
./wine-portable-5.x-staging-amd64.sh application.exe
Use create_wine_portable.sh.
This script will use ready-to-use binaries to create portable Wine executable.
If you want to create a runtime, squashfuse and Wine build from the scratch, then read the next section below.
All components used in this project (the runtime, the squashfuse and the Wine builds) were created using the official sources.
For my and your convenience i regularly upload ready-to-use runtime, squashfuse and Wine builds.
If you want, you can create everything yourself using the available scripts.
Available scripts:
The first two scripts are available in another my project: https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds
Keep in mind that this project is new and it has not been thoroughly tested. Please report any problems you find.