How to force Wine into acting like 32-bit Windows on 64-bit Ubuntu?

It turns out that to make Wine run in 32-bit-only mode, one needs to:

1. Remove ~/.wine if it was already created in the 64-bit mode. (WARNING: This removes all stuff you have installed under Wine. Move it aside instead if you want to avoid dataloss.)

2. Set the WINEARCH environment variable to win32 i.e. export WINEARCH=win32

3. Then run wine (or winetricks, etc.)

Install playonlinux there you will have this option. It is a frontend to wine, and makes it far better.

This picture was taken on a 12.04 - 64bit system.

You can in an easy way copy all win32 files into .wine to substitute the lesser need to change all run commands as well. By avoiding doing to much changes to the system in another hand. At first, run the command:

WINEPREFIX="$HOME/prefix32" WINEARCH=win32 wine wineboot

Assume you already made a run of making .wine with 64bit compatibility. If not you are still able to make a folder called .wine instead in your home directory.

Then copy all content of prefix32 found in your home directory to your .wine content area both files and directories, first either backup or just remove the content in the directory .wine if you already are planning running 32bit arch of wine, don't overwrite content! Rather delete if you already made a backup.

Remember that directory .wine might be hidden, any use of seeing hidden files will make you be able to see the folder in your home directory. You can as well use the Go in Thunar with Ubuntu to either just go straight into the folder called .wine in the home directory and make the process as told here before.