I tried to install Wine-stable (1.8.5) in Yakkety using the official ppa: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
to no avail. The ppa doesn't seem valid and all i get is the old wine1.6. And it doesn't even show up in the main menu.
Is there another way to properly install it (1.8.5)?
The correct command to install Wine-stable (1.8.5) is
sudo apt install wine-stable
. Just wine won't do. I hope it will help you.A PPA is only built for versions of Ubuntu the PPA maintainer wants it built for.
In this case, you can see from its page on Launchpad that it's currently only built for versions of Ubuntu up to Xenial. I'm sure they'll add Yakkety in time, but PPAs lagging behind releases is perfectly normal.
Further, it seems fairly abandoned. I can't see an update this year. It's also not uncommon for PPAs to go through this lifecycle of adoption to "official unofficial repo" and then die off to be replaced by another.
The PPA at
ppa:wine/wine-builds
seems a lot healthier. It has Yakkety builds but these are the development and staging versions (which everybody playing any games is using because they have the latest and greatestbugsfixes).But yes, if you're happy with [or require] 1.8.5, the main repo should keep you happy.
Yakkety repository has wine 1.8.5 (check here), so no need to add a PPA.
Just install it using the command