Wine Gecko

Wine implements its own version of Internet Explorer. The implementation is based on a custom version of Mozilla's Gecko Layout Engine. When your application tries to display a web page, it loads Wine's custom Gecko from the file wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86.cab (at least in the latest version of Wine; older versions of Wine use older versions of Gecko).

Wine looks for this file first in /usr/share/wine/gecko/ (good distributions of Wine put that file there). Wine 1.1.33 and later will download Gecko when a prefix is created. Older Wines will download Gecko when an application tries to display a web page (but some apps don't like to wait, and hang or crash). The Gecko downloader itself had a crash bug (Bug 20160) which has been fixed in Wine 1.1.33.

If your distribution of Wine doesn't put the .cab file in the right place for you, you can avoid problems by putting it there yourself as follows:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86.cab
$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/wine/gecko
$ sudo mv wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86.cab /usr/share/wine/gecko/

The above information is accurate for wine-1.1.27 or later. Older version of Wine use other Gecko versions:

If you installed Wine in some $prefix rather than /usr, it will look in $prefix/share/wine/gecko/ instead of /usr/share/wine/gecko. e.g. if you installed it from source, then the default-path is /usr/local/share/wine/gecko.

Running Wine from source tree

If you are using Git or running Wine from source code, then Wine will try to find the .cab file by looking in ../gecko/ (relative to the source tree).

Debug info

If Gecko is crashing on you, you can download a debug build to get more verbose logs. Here's how:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86-dbg.cab
$ cd .wine/drive_c/windows/system32/gecko/1.0.0
$ mv wine_gecko wine_gecko.old
$ cabextract -x ~/wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86-dbg.cab

Sadly, backtraces still aren't symbolic; hopefully that can be fixed.

Distributions that are known to package Gecko properly

• Gentoo
• Mandriva Linux
• openSUSE
• Arch Linux

• WineBottler

See also

• MozillaIntegration

• iexplore

• BuildingWineGecko