The regression testing howto isn't really applicable, to be honest. It's some very advanced stuff involving checking wine out of the development repository, which you totally don't need to do. Try this: Download the source of whatever version you're interested in (you want a .tar.bz2 file, that's an archive format like .zip) http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241&package_id=77449 Extract the downloaded file (try right-clicking in your file manager and going to something like "extract"). This should create a folder of the same name as the archive (i.e. if you downloaded the source archive wine-1.1.0.tar.bz2, extracting it should create the folder "wine-1.1.0" containing the sources for wine. Download your patch (should be a .patch file) and save it into the root of this folder as well. Open a command line (terminal). Navigate to the wine directory. For example, if you extracted your archive into /home/brian/development/wine-1.1.0, then you would open a terminal and issue the following command: (cd means "change directory"). cd /home/brian/development/wine-1.1.0 Apply your patch using the following command: patch -p1 < whateverfile.patch Look carefully at the output. If it tells you that "hunks failed", stop. Your patch didn't apply, because the source has changed too much from the version the patch was made for. Are you sure you downloaded the version of wine the patch was made for? Post here for more help if this happens. If the patch applied successfully, it's time to compile wine. Open up your package manager (i.e. synaptic) and remove the "wine" package, which you will be replacing. Then install the build-essential package. This includes the gcc compilers and some libraries which you will need to build wine. Additionally, install the packages "nasm", "yasm" and "bison". Go back to your terminal and type the command ./configure Watch the output carefully. If it tells you that you need something else that I've forgotten, search for it on Synaptic or post here and we'll tell you what package to download. If the command finished successfully, you'll see it end with "run make depend && make to compile wine". In that case, run the following command: (if you have a single core machine, run:) make depend && make (if you have dual core machine, instead run:) make depend && make -j 3 (quad core machine, instead run:) make depend && make -j 6 Then sit back and grab a cup of coffee, wine will take anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes to compile, depending on your machine. If the make command produces errors, come back here. Otherwise, if it finishes successfully, issue the command "sudo make install" to install wine, and type your password when prompted. You can now use the "wine" command to run your newly patched wine. :) Check to make sure you're running the expected version using wine --version.