Can I run a Windows .exe file on Linux? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

The exe file will either execute under Linux or Windows, but not both.

Executes Under Windows

If the file is a windows file, it will not run under Linux on it's own. So if that's the case, you could try running it under a Windows compatibility layer (Wine). If it's not compatible with wine, then you won't be able to execute it under Linux.

Before you can start, you will need to install Wine. The steps you need to install Wine will vary with the Linux platform you are on. You can probably Google "Ubuntu install wine", if for example, you're installing Ubuntu.

Once you have wine installed, then you'd be able to execute these commands.

wine xxx.exe

Execute Under Linux

If you know this file to run under linux, then you'll want to execute these commands:

You'll want to change permissions to allow all users to execute this file (a+x). you could also allow just the user to execute (u+x)

chmod a+x xxx.exe

Launch the program, the ./ tells the command line to look in the current path for the file to execute (if the 'current' directory isn't in the $PATH environment variable.

./xxx.exe

Solution 2:

The operating system (Windows or Linux) provides services to applications. For example, Windows and Linux will have functions that the application can call to access files, to access the network, to display things on the screen, etc.

The different operating systems provide different ways of doing those things, so an application that does it the Windows way won't work on Linux, and vice versa, even though the CPU architecture is the same.