How to install 32 Bit Wine on 64 Bit Ubuntu?

Things have changed a few times since my original answer. 64bit prefixes versions of Wine are pretty capable these days. I haven't had a pure 32bit version in at least a few years.

Your "Wine prefix" (traditionally at ~/.wine/, but settable via env WINEPREFIX) controls how things will be run for the lifetime of that prefix. If you set up a 32bit prefix, everything will run in 32bit mode in that prefix. Conversely, if you don't do anything and run anything special, you'll create a Wine64 environment.

If you're starting a new prefix (ie on a new install of Ubuntu), you'll need to do a few special things:

# Move the old prefix (if one exists)
# You could rm -rf it if you don't want it.
mv ~/.wine/ ~/oldwine/

# Create prefix with right arch, per
# http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#32_bit_wineprefix
WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

And that's it. Unless you're specifying another prefix that doesn't exist yet, you shouldn't need to set WINEARCH again.

The revision history to this answer holds additional information that I don't think is relevant in 2018. This is mostly point and shoot these days.

Step 1: Install wine 1.4. This version of wine supports win32 and win64.

Step 2: Open a terminal.

Step 3: export WINEPREFIX=prefix32

Step 4: export WINEARCH=win32

Step 5: winecfg

Step 6: Enjoy, the new prefix is set for 32-bit execution.

This is the proper way to do this. Installing cross-arch packages is a dirty fix that's likely to cause you trouble.

The best ways to do this:

1. (Permanently) Edit /etc/environment:

   • sudo nano /etc/environment

   • Add the following line:

     WINEARCH=win32

   Note: by the above solution, wine & wibom use always the 32 bit version of wine.

2. (Temporary) Open a terminal(Ctrl-Alt-t) and type:

   • `env WINEARCH=win32 wine or
   • `env WINEARCH=win32 winecfg for 1st .wine 32 bit bottle