How To Successfully Install Wine PPA In Linux Mint 14

After installing Linux Mint 14, I attempted to install Wine by adding the Wine PPA to my software sources. However, when I tried updating I got this error:

Err http://ppa.launchpad.net nadia/main Sources
404 Not Found

Notice that the word after the PPA location is “nadia”. This is the codename for Linux Mint 14, not the codename for the version of Ubuntu that it is based off of, which is what needs to go there.

To fix this, you just need to manually edit your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-wine-ppa-nadia.list file. My command-line editor of choice for quick edits is nano:

Replace the two “nadia” words with “quantal” (Linux Mint 14 “nadia” is based off of Ubuntu 12.10, and the codename for Ubuntu 12.10 is “quantal”).

Save and try updating again (“sudo apt-get update”) and it should update fine. You should now be able to install Wine fine.

Simple explanation of why this happens:
Normally, when adding a PPA to an Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, aptitude adds the codename of the system to the line it adds in the sources.list entry so that the packages are pulled from the correct repositories (i.e. “quantal”, “precise”, etc.). It seems that the creators of Linux Mint decided to rebrand every aspect of the Ubuntu operating system to match the Linux Mint details, and in doing so changed the internal Ubuntu-based codename of the distribution to the Linux Mint codename. For this reason, aptitude tries to use the Linux Mint codename rather than the Ubuntu one and then aptitude fails when searching the Ubuntu repositories for the Linux Mint codename.

This is the first I’ve seen this problem, but I imagine its fairly common among Mint users installing packages via PPAs added via software sources.

WineHQ – Installing the latest Wine on Ubuntu.