Cannot install Wine Emulator

[dgd1988]

I have an Intel-based processor (not that that is crucial to understand or anything) I received this message while trying to install Wine Emulator.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  wine: Depends: libaudio2 but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

The problem you get here is a dependency problem. Most probably that something did hang the installation of libaudio2 like a sudden reboot.

You may fix this dependency problem by accessing System / Administration / Synaptic

Click on Custom Filters ( at the left of the window ) and click on Broken ( at the left-top of the windows ).

You'll see the list of the broken packages which you may reinstall before all.

I set the bug to Invalid. If you have further problems while installing Wine or libaudio2, can you provide more details about it?

Thanks for your bug report.

[dgd1988 (ddunnington)]

I went into Synaptic package manager and didn't find any broken packages.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Interesting! Can-you try to reinstall Wine from the Universe repository? ( Remove the official wine repositories from your /etc/apt/sources.list file ) and do :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

Thanks for your help on this.

[dgd1988 (ddunnington)]

Umm, I am unsure how to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list thing. But I do know how to install from the terminal.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Ok, I will give you the instruction how to do this with synaptic :

You can open synaptic from a terminal by typing : gksu synaptic ( or by opening synaptic into the System / Administration menu )

Click on Settings / repositories and choose the "Third-Party Software" Tab.

You shouldn't have Wine repositories here. Perhaps that their wine version have dependencies that aren't disponible in Gutsy so you should remove the Wine repository. On a normal Gutsy installation, you only get two "http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu gutsy partner" repository and that's all. I suggest you to be sure that you don't have additionnal repository. ( You can refer to the attached picture if you are unsure ).

After this, you can try to install wine ( from synaptic or by using "sudo apt-get install wine" from a terminal windows ).

Can you tell here if the installation of wine is successful?

[dgd1988 (ddunnington)]

Here's what I got while doing that.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
david@david-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install wine
[sudo] password for david:
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?
david@david-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install wine
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.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  wine: Depends: libaudio2 but it is not installable
E: Broken packages
david@david-laptop:~$

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Mmh dgd1988 :

Did you look correctly for Broken packages in synaptic? It clearly says here that there's a broken package which should appear in synaptic if you follow the instruction that I gave you in my first post.

You can also try this : start Synaptic, go to Edit, and select "Fix broken packages."

Does this solve your issue?

[dgd1988 (ddunnington)]

I went into Synaptic Package Manager to ->Edit -> Fix broken packages. It said it successfully fixed them, but then I go back to Add/Remove Applications to install Wine and this comes up:

Cannot install 'wine'

This application conflicts with other installed software. To install 'wine' the conflicting software must be removed first.

Switch to the 'synaptic' package manager to resolve this conflict.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Can you try to install wine through Synaptic? Synaptic will show you
which package must be removed before installing wine and should be able
to fix that situation.

If you can give me more information about which package synaptic need to
remove, I would greatly appreaciate!

Thanks to take time to make ubuntu better!

[Greg Linden (gmlinden)]

Did this ever get resoloved? I'm having the same problem in Ubuntu 7.10. Synaptic tells me wine has unresolvable dependencies, but it does not recognize the file as "Broken" (perhaps because it was never installed?). The uninstallable parts are binfmt-support (>=1.1.2) and libaudio2.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[dgd1988 (ddunnington)]

Yes I did. Sorry for not responding. All I did was restart my laptop and it fixed everything. Bug cleared then.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Hi Greg, I tested this again with the latest Gutsy release and didn't get to confirm the bug. binfmt-support is in 1.1.10 version and the dependencies specify >=1.1.2 so it seems all OK here.

Can you look if you have all Ubuntu repositories checked in Synaptic? Most of time, this kind of problem can be explained by absence of activated repositories.

After making sure that all repositories are activated, you should do this to install wine :

sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install wine

If there's still some errors with the installation of wine with aptitude, can-you give us the output from the terminal?

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

dgd1988 : Thanks for this information. That probably just means that the packages list wasn't up to date on your computer. It's automatically updated at each boot.

I'm happy that this problem is solved for you.

Thanks again and feel free to report any other bug you find.

[Greg Linden (gmlinden)]

Saïvann : Thanks for your reply. No joy yet.

I'm not sure what repositories are, but I
searched on 'repos' in synaptic and all the
packages that came up were active.

I should explain that I'm running ubuntu in a
virtual machine (Parallels on a MacBook). If
there is no easy fix, I will abandon the
installation and find a Windows copy to install.
I just need to run a few small programs.

Below is the output from the terminal.

Thanks again for your time.

greg@greg-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get update
Ign cdrom://Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release
i386 (20071016) gutsy/main Translation-en_US
Ign cdrom://Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release
i386 (20071016) gutsy/restricted Translation-en_US
Get:1 http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy Release.gpg [191B]
Ign http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy/main Translation-en_US
Hit http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy Release
Ign http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy/main Packages
Hit http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy/main Sources
Hit http://wine.budgetdedicated.com gutsy/main Packages
Fetched 1B in 1s (1B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
greg@greg-desktop:~$ sudo aptitude install wine
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
   wine
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 10.9MB of archives. After unpacking 48.9MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   wine: Depends: binfmt-support (>= 1.1.2) which is a virtual package.
         Depends: libaudio2 which is a virtual package.
Resolving dependencies...
Unable to resolve dependencies! Giving up...
Abort.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Repositories are in Ubuntu a huge server which contains thousands of programs and libraries all disposable to download and install in Ubuntu. Dependencies are all managed by synaptic in this incredible system. It makes installation of programs really easy and avoid incompatibilities or else.

From what I see, it's normal that you doesn't get to install wine because the ubuntu repositories are not activated. The only repositories that are activated are the Wine one, but you'll not be able to install dependencies if the Ubuntu repositories themself aren't enabled. Anyway, you doesn't need to add Wine repositories in order to install Wine because Wine is already in the Ubuntu repositories ( like most of all OS softwares ) so what you need to do is :

1. Open Synaptic and click on Settings / Repositories
2. Go to the Third Party tab and remove everything you find in that section ( except of course if there are some that you want to keep, but I suggest you to delete them all, including all Wine Budgetdedicated repositories )
3. Then go to Ubuntu Software tab and check everything, and click on Close
4. You're now back into Synaptic, and you can click on Reload to reload the list of packages.
5. Remove any Wine version you could have installed before re-installing it through synaptic, everything should work now.

See these screenshots :

http://upload.leservicetechnique.com/bugs/Synaptic1.png
http://upload.leservicetechnique.com/bugs/Synaptic2.png
http://upload.leservicetechnique.com/bugs/Synaptic3.png

Does that fix your issue?

Little trick : To install commonly used Windows Dlls in order to get better chance to bring Windows programs to work under Linux, I suggest you to download Wine-doors which will do all this work for you. You can find it here :
http://www.wine-doors.org/wordpress/?page_id=3

[Greg Linden (gmlinden)]

Wow! It worked like a dream and I got my first Windows app running
on Ubuntu. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to help me.
I hope your detailed directions will be of use to other newbies.
Many thanks.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

I'm glad it helped you :) I plan to open a website with such helping informations.

Also thanks for your comment on the bug report. I set it to invalid has it finally wasn't a bug but feel free to post any other bug you might find!

Welcome to OpenSource software !

[Lolkereltje (lolkereltje)]

Wow thanks indeed! You helped me too :D I was reading all the comments on this page, and the last to-do helped me! Thanks again!

[joshkahn (joshkahn21)]

Thank you soooo much. I followed this whole thread and was getting the same error messages as well. I didn't know what to do. Everex help was no help except they gave me this link and now it's fixed thanks to you. All I had to do was check the correct repositories and reload them and then it let me install Wine. (And Java6 for that matter. Previously, i could only load java4 from the restricted-extras package.)

Thank you so much for your help. Open source is awesome! Many Many thanks, I registered for this site just to say thank you!

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Wow! I'm very glad (and surprised) that it helped so much people :) . I think that ubuntu repositories are disabled when the computer is installed without Internet access, that might be why so many people get this kind of issue... Well thank you for the thank you :) Enjoy Open source too!

[joshkahn (joshkahn21)]

Thank you! I'll try to enjoy it. Do you have a recommendation for a desktop machine or another laptop that runs ubuntu? i'm in south america and going to sell my cloudbook in peru because i can get a good price and i won't need it anymore. then i can buy a desktop for my new place and i'd want a laptop too. Do you have any recommendations? i will need to run some apps that need advanced java and will have some moving and updating graphics. i was looking at the HomeBox 2440 for the desktop. any ideas?

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Mmh actually you'd better not use a bug tracker for that kind of questions, it's designed to work fixing issues. If you want, send me a direct email (<email address hidden>) I'd be pleased to answer you what I know :) .