Is wineserver a default (program/process) on Ubuntu?

I saw in my Ubuntu 14.04 installation that there is a process called wineserver.

Is that a default process/program when you install Ubuntu? I have another machine running the same OS (14.04) and don't have this process running.

PS.: I don't have wine (run win apps) installed in both machines.

1 Answer

wineserver is a component of wine. It shouldn't be present in a default clean Ubuntu installation. Someone either manually installed it or it was installed as a dependency of another package.

Please try the following:

1. Where is wineserver?

   Use which to find out:

   $ which wineserver
   /usr/bin/wineserver

   winserver's full path is /usr/bin/wineserver.

2. What package "owns" that file?

   Use dpkg -S:

   $ dpkg -S /usr/bin/wineserver
   winehq-devel: /usr/bin/wineserver

   /usr/bin/wineserver is there because it is part of package winehq-devel.

3. Why is that package installed? (You'll need aptitude for this, or you can also use apt-cache --installed rdepends <package>)

   Run aptitude why:

   $ aptitude why winehq-devel
   i playonlinux Depends wine | wine-development
   i winehq-devel Provides wine 

   winehq-devel was manually installed (the line starts with i A for automatically installed packages). It's also a dependency of package playonlinux, so if I uninstall winehq-devel I have to uninstall playonlinux, too.

4. If you don't need it, remove it.

   sudo apt-get purge winehq-devel

5. When was it installed?

   dpkg maintains a log in the files /var/log/dpkg.log*

   $ grep "install winehq-devel" /var/log/dpkg.log*
   /var/log/dpkg.log.1:2016-04-04 14:01:31 install winehq-devel:amd64 <none> 1.9.7~ubuntu16.04.1

   Of course, replace winehq-devel with the actual name of the wine package installed in your system. As you can see, winehq-devel was installed on 2016-04-04 14:01:31.

   There's also the apt logs located at /var/log/apt/history.log*. I found this in file /var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz:

   Start-Date: 2016-04-04 14:01:00
   Requested-By: carvalho (1000)
   Install: ..., winehq-devel:amd64 (1.9.7~ubuntu16.04.1), ...

   No surprise, I intentionally installed winehq-devel.

Good luck!