Installing BZL Wallet on Ubuntu 17.10 with Linux WINE

If like me you were keen to get your hands on a BZL wallet for the exciting new Portuguese airdrop that has started, as a Linux user you may of been left disappointed.

While I imagine that the latest wallet works well in more stable distributions such as the long-term supported Ubuntu 16.04, with the latest 17.10 I had no success in getting the wallet to install. I tried building different versions from source as well as testing the QT images (that usually work) but none of these helped. I was left riddled with dependency issues despite how many libboost symlinks I produced.

So I turned to Linux WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and unsurprisingly the Windows executable for the latest v1.0.2 works perfectly well, as well as previous versions in fact. If you are facing the same problem as me in artful or stretch for example I'd recommend doing the same.

To install wine and download the Windows executable enter the following commands into terminal (changing $HOME to your path):

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key
sudo apt-add-repository https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/
sudo apt update && sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-stable
sudo reboot
mkdir ~/.wineprefix
WINEPREFIX="/$HOME/.wineprefix/bzlwallet" wine wineboot
wget https://github.com/bzlcoin/bzlcoin/releases/download/v1.0.2/BZLCoin.exe
mv BZLCoin.exe ~/.wineprefix/bzlwallet

In these commands we obtain the WINE release key to install the latest stable version as well as Mono and Gecko when prompted. Create the directory .wineprefix in order to create the bzlcoin prefix. Download the Windows .exe file and move it to the wineprefix directory.

We can then launch BZL wallet with the following command:

WINEPREFIX="/$HOME/.wineprefix/bzlwallet" wine /$HOME/.wineprefix/bzlwallet/BZLCoin.exe

Now you can sign up to the airdrop with your BZL address.