Installing Wine on Ubuntu 12.10 on 64 bit System

I had some issues installing Wine on my new install of Ubuntu 12.10. I kept getting dependency issues and errors no matter what I tried and Google was of no help for days. After some researching and finding some better criteria to search for, I finally found a solution. This tip has been summarized from here.

The gist of what's going on is that newer versions of apt and dpkg support a feature called "multiarch". Quite simply, you can specify that apt pulls package info from repositories for architectures other than the native install, and install multiarch compatible packages from those repos. For more info you can read this.

Check your native architecture with:

sudo dpkg --print-architecture #in your case this should return 'amd64'

Other available architectures can be shown by:

sudo dpkg --print-foreign-architectures #in your case this should not return anything

So you need to configure a new foreign architecture (quantal/12.10 only**):

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Check your new arch is now available, update and install your package with apt:

sudo dpkg --print-foreign-architectures #now this should return 'i386'
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install wine1.5 #and away you go!

Hopefully it helps someone (or at least gave you something to read in the bathroom).