How do I create a 32-bit WINE prefix?

To create a 32-bit WINE prefix on a 64-bit Ubuntu system, you need to open a terminal and run the following command:

WINEPREFIX="$HOME/prefix32" WINEARCH=win32 wine wineboot

• Where WINEPREFIX is the directory for the prefix
• This directory must not already exist or you will get an error! Please do not manually create it in Nautilus or with mkdir./

This Is how I did it. The above answer - for me - did not work.

First I deleted the Wine folder with this command:

rm -r ~/.wine

If it tells you that directory is not empty just add the -f (force) flag. Note that this will remove any windows applications installed in this prefix!

Your command should look something like this:

rm -r -f ~/.wine

And then create a 32 bit prefix with this command:

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wine wineboot

Just creating a wine32 prefix/directory (without wine64 prefix/directory) will not work. As was suggested above (but not fully written out) - and if you want to avoid the need to use winecfg (which is annyoing in automation - you need to somehow close it), here is the full solution: create a wine64, then a wine32 directory. If you use winetricks to check it (it gives a warning for wine64 directories), it will report both correctly (wine64 gives the warning, since it's 64, wine32 does not, since it's 32.). The solution;

rm -Rf ./wine   # carefull, this deletes your entire wine config (fine if you want to start afresh)

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wineboot

...wait...

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 wineboot

After this, you can:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 your_32bit_executable.exe

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine WINEARCH=win64 your_64bit_executable.exe

I was running into the same issue.

Type WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine winecfg

It should start to download the drivers necessary. I believe this issue is due to a problem occurring during the normal download. For me it my internet dropped as it was originally downloading the drivers.

Test if you already have multiarch enabled:

dpkg --print-foreign-architectures | grep -q i386 && sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Then install wine32:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine32

And finally, don't delete your 64-bit wine install. just rename it to .wine64 then create a new .wine folder for your 32-bit apps:

mv ~/.wine ~/.wine64 && WINEARCH=win32 wineboot

After erasing .wine32, installing the .NET 4.0 with the command $ WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 winetricks dotnet40, worked for me.

kudos Antonio

handy shell .rc snippet

alias wine32='WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.win32 wine'
alias wine64='WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX=~/.win64 wine'
win32() {
    export WINEARCH=win32
    export WINEPREFIX=~/.win32
}
win64() {
    export WINEARCH=win64
    export WINEPREFIX=~/.win64
}