installing older version of wine on Mavericks from tar.bz2 file

Question

I remember that a program I desperately need to use stopped working after I updated wine. The last version I remember it worked perfectly on is the very version 1.5.8, which I have downloaded from here: http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.5.8 as a tar.bz2 file.

After all the struggles I have gone through trying to successfully install this specific release of wine (1.5.8) I have given up and decided to turn to this site for help.

I always installed and managed wine via MacPorts but this time it will not be possible since MacPorts doesn't allow me to install older versions of wine. I would like to ask you please if anyone could help me and tell me (explain) how to install this particular version of wine from that tar.bz2 file.

I'm using OS X 10.9, Mavericks. The program I'm trying to run is Lingea Lexicon 5 but it's not really important, I remember it worked perfectly on 1.5.8 but it doesn't on the current release 1.6.2, it crashes at start.

Please bear in mind that I'm not an experienced user of Terminal, I can do some basic things but my knowledge of commands is limited. Thank you again.

Answer 1

MacPorts

It is possible to install older editions of software using MacPorts. The following article explains how, How to install an older version of a port.

The example given by the article using this notation for the tcl package:

sudo port activate tcl @8.4.16_0

Try this for the wine package:

sudo port activate wine @1.5.8

HomeBrew

Alternatively, consider installing using the HomeBrew project. This article by David Baumgold walks through the steps required, Installing Wine on Mac OS X.

brew is also able to install a specific version of a package, see Homebrew install specific version of formula?

tar.bz2

If you want to manually install wine from the downloaded tar.bz2 source, follow the steps in Wine User Guide: 2.3. Installing Wine from source.

This approach will require installing the Xcode command line tools and dealing with dependencies. Because of this, I highly recommend using brew or another pre-built package approach.

osxwinebuilder

An open source project called osxwinebuilder attempts to ease the process of building wine from source. This project may be helpful as it claims:

The goal of this project is to provide easy-to-use scripts for cleanly building and installing Wine and its prerequisite software into a self-contained directory hierarchy on Mac OS X.

Emulators

If you encounter problems compiling from source, consider using a PC emulator such as VMware Fusion, Parallels, or Virtual Box. All these can run Windows on your Mac and thus run Lingea Lexicon 5 for you. In addition, VMware Fusion and Parallels both offer commercial support should you encounter problems.