Installing and Playing World of Warcraft in Linux
- December 1st, 2008
- Posted in Gaming
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[a more recent article on this subject is posted here]
World of Warcraft. Or WoW in short. Probably the most played game on this entire globe today. And I can understand why. The game is really mesmerizing and is able to suck you into it’s own world and offers a lot for a variety of folk out there.
But… It’s a Mac and Windows only game.
Fortunately being also for Mac means that it supports OpenGL as well and therefore there is no real reason why it shouldn’t be able to run natively on Linux as well. Seeing that there are more Linux users than Mac users (I think), the reason why there isn’t a native Linux client for WoW really is beyond me, but is also beyond the scope of this blog. What we want to do is play WoW, and on our Linux desktops no less.
So here we go : Installing and playing World of Warcraft in Linux.
First off, you need to download the client downloader and installer from the world of warcraft website. You know where to do that yourself I hope and I won’t go into it here.
Download it and run it and let it install WoW. It might give you the odd errormessage popup now and then, but in my experience, i could just click the OK button and it continued anyway. Quite possibly it was trying to tell me that it made a folder structure on my harddisk in the ‘Shared’ section or something like that. It also might ask you to download Gecko because of some HTML content. Just OK it.
After it’s done downloading the installation, it will show you the screen of your version with the install option in the left of the window.
click to view full size
Click it and behold : the EULA.
Now if you have a situation similar to my own, this might show you the entire EULA and when you scroll all the way down, the damned ‘AGREE’ button stays grayed out. Turns out that Blizzard is using some browser specific things to enable that AGREE button and since we do not have a webbrowser in our environment, it’s not registering we scrolled all the way down and therefore it doesn’t work. (Sloppy Blizzard, very very sloppy to hang functionality on something your users might not even have)
Anyway, the way to fix that issue, is installing Internet Explorer in our Wine environment by using ies4linux, which you can get here. Follow the instructions and it you will have IE installed in your Wine environment.
If it works just fine for you, Wine must have fixed this issue themselves and you can forget all about the ie4linux thing i just wrote and continue.
Just accept the defaults, and you will get this :
click to view full size
YES ! Its the installer running providing you with a rather nice WOTLK tune and the story about Prince Arthas while downloading the game.
And from there on it’s just wait until it’s done.
Now if all goes well, you can start up World of Warcraft, but not before you did some other things.
It is recommended to start the Launcher before you enter the game and you will see it runs some additional updates as well.
After that, you can either start the game and run it in it’s DirectX mode, or alternatively, you can create a launcher on your desktop that executes the following command :
wine “/home/yourfolder/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WoW.exe” -opengl.
That will fire up wine and parse the -opengl as a commandline parameter to World of Warcraft so that you force it to run on OpenGL, which of course has better performance on Linux.
This should conclude getting World of Warcraft to run on Linux without using evil junk like Cedega.
If you have questions, don’t hesitate to leave a note !
Enjoy.
I’m curious – I’m dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu.
I’ve had my XP Install for years, so I’ve been attempting to use Wine to run applications off of the NTFS partition – including World of Warcraft.
I can get WoW to load, I can login, get to my characters, and get into the game. However, my frame rate is significantly lower than in Windows; and whenever I try to log out and into another character, the game seems to hang, or at least all I get is a black screen – I have to forcibly terminate the Wow.exe process from the shell.
Should I instead install a fresh copy of WoW into my ext3 partition, and see how it plays from there?
Hi digital,
The problem with NTFS partitions is that file access from linux is fine until you start working with really big files (1G+).
There seems to be a real performance issue in the drivers that access the NTFS filesystem when using big files. VMWare for example has this very same problem.
When working with large files on NTFS, a process called mount.ntfs i think it’s called spawns and sucks away a really large portion of processing power which in its turn slows the whole PC down, sometimes even to a crawl.
Since World of Warcraft consists of a few really large files that contain all the object and texture data etc, you can imagine that for drawing a new scene, the program has to access those large files lots of times to get the textures and objects it needs for rendering.
The best you can do is simply copy that WoW installation of yours onto an ext3 partition and see what happens.
In my experience, WoW should be able to run with approximately the same FPS rate as in native windows DirectX as WoW is capable of running in OpenGL mode, which is native to linux.
If you still get the same results, drop me a note and we can look further. My best guess however is that your lack of performance is indeed related to your use of the NTFS partition and large files as you hinted already.