SysTutorials

Building 32-bit Wine on CentOS 7, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux

· Eric Ma and Community · updated April 11, 2026

RHEL-based distributions only provide 64-bit Wine packages in their standard repositories. Many Windows applications—especially legacy software—require 32-bit Wine. Building Wine from source is the most reliable approach to get a working 32-bit installation alongside 64-bit support.

Prerequisites and Resource Requirements

Building Wine requires significant resources:

Ensure you have at least 4GB of free disk space in /usr/src and adequate RAM. If your system has less than 2GB RAM, you’ll need to limit parallel jobs during compilation.

Remove Existing Wine Installation

If Wine is already installed from packages, remove it to prevent conflicts:

sudo yum erase wine wine-\*

Install Build Dependencies

Start with development tools:

sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools' -y
sudo yum install samba-winbind-clients -y

Install architecture-specific development libraries. You need both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) versions for each package:

sudo yum install \
  glibc-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libgcc.{i686,x86_64} \
  libX11-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  freetype-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  gnutls-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libxml2-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libjpeg-turbo-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libpng-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libXrender-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libXext-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  alsa-lib-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libXfixes-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  -y

Optionally install these for broader compatibility:

sudo yum install \
  openssl-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  libcap-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  vulkan-loader-devel.{i686,x86_64} \
  -y

Download Wine Source

Set your desired Wine version and download. Wine 9.x is currently stable (2026):

VER=9.0
VERMAJOR=$(echo ${VER} | cut -d'.' -f1)
VERURLSTR=$(echo ${VER} | cut -d'.' -f1,2)

cd /usr/src
sudo wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/${VERURLSTR}/wine-${VER}.tar.xz
sudo tar xf wine-${VER}.tar.xz
cd wine-${VER}

Check WineHQ’s download page for available versions. Modern Wine versions use xz compression exclusively.

Prepare Build Directories

Create separate build directories to keep 32-bit and 64-bit builds isolated:

mkdir -p wine32 wine64

Build 64-bit Wine First

The 32-bit build depends on 64-bit libraries, so compile 64-bit first:

cd wine64
../configure --enable-win64
make -j$(nproc)

The -j$(nproc) flag uses all available CPU cores. If compilation fails with memory errors (“gcc: fatal error: Killed signal terminated program cc1plus”), reduce parallel jobs:

make -j2

On systems with very limited RAM, use -j1 (single-threaded compilation).

Build 32-bit Wine

Link the 32-bit build against the 64-bit libraries you just compiled:

cd ../wine32
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig ../configure --with-wine64=../wine64
make -j$(nproc)

Install Both Versions

Install 32-bit first, then 64-bit (order matters):

cd ../wine32
sudo make install

cd ../wine64
sudo make install

Both binaries install to /usr/local/bin by default. To install to a custom prefix, add --prefix=/opt/wine-9.0 to both configure commands.

Verify Installation

Confirm both versions installed correctly:

file $(which wine)
file $(which wine64)

Expected output:

/usr/local/bin/wine: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), ...
/usr/local/bin/wine64: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), ...

The “ELF 32-bit” and “ELF 64-bit” strings confirm correct installation. If you see “ELF 64-bit” for both, the 32-bit build failed—check the make output for errors and ensure all i686 development libraries installed.

Running Windows Applications

Run 32-bit Windows executables with Wine’s automatic detection:

wine program.exe

Wine automatically selects 32-bit or 64-bit based on the executable format. For legacy 32-bit applications, you can explicitly set the architecture:

WINEARCH=win32 wine program.exe

Check the installed Wine version:

wine --version

Troubleshooting Build Errors

Missing dependencies during configure

Check the configure output carefully. Install the -devel package for the missing library in both i686 and x86_64 variants, then run configure again in the wine32 directory.

“cannot find -lXfixes” or similar linker errors

The multiarch libraries didn’t install correctly. Reinstall the problematic package:

sudo yum install libXfixes-devel.{i686,x86_64}

Restart the configure step in wine32:

cd wine32
../configure --with-wine64=../wine64
make -j$(nproc)

“32-bit libraries not found” after configure

You likely missed installing some {i686,x86_64} packages. Re-run the dependencies section and verify all packages installed:

rpm -qa | grep -E 'i686|x86_64' | grep devel | wc -l

This should return at least 15-20 packages. If significantly lower, reinstall the full dependency list.

Compilation out of memory (OOM kill)

Your system ran out of memory. Reduce parallel jobs:

make -j1

Alternatively, close background applications and increase swap space temporarily.

“libtoolize: error: file named ‘ltmain.sh’ not found”

Run autoreconf before configure:

cd wine64
autoreconf -fiv
../configure --enable-win64

Upgrading Wine

To upgrade to a newer Wine version:

  1. Download and extract the new version to /usr/src
  2. Repeat the build process with the new version
  3. The new build installs alongside the old one (both in /usr/local/bin)

To switch back to an older version, simply run:

ln -sf /usr/local/bin/wine-9.0 /usr/local/bin/wine

Removing Wine Completely

To uninstall Wine entirely:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/wine* /usr/local/lib/wine /usr/local/include/wine

If you used a custom --prefix during configure, remove that directory instead:

sudo rm -rf /opt/wine-9.0
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