On addition to my first post about this subject, after close to 2 years it is time to revisit and revise the whole manual to get World of Warcraft running on Wine.

So, let’s make a few assumptions here :

- You have a system running at least Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx, fully updated.
- You want to play World of Warcraft on it.
- You came here for an in-depth guide on how to get that done.

Alrighty, let’s get cracking then !

First thing you need to do is make sure that you have the right drivers installed for your video adapter and that you actually have hardware OpenGL support up and running on your system.

This is usually accomplished by running System->Administration->Hardware and then installing the proprietary hardware drivers for your particular videocard.

OpenGL hardware capabilities are also referred to as DRI, which means Direct Rendering Infrastructure. Without it, OpenGL will heavily lean on your CPU for all it’s calculations instead of your GPU. When you run a rather CPU intensive program, such as a computer game like World of Warcraft, you really do not want to do without it.

To check if you have DRI installed and running, type the following command in a shell :

$ glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes

If you get the response ‘direct rendering : Yes’ or something similar, you are up and running and can go ahead to install Wine.
If you get the response ‘direct rendering : No’, then you need to enable that first. Look for tutorials on how to do that as that is beyond the scope of this post.
If you get a message that the command is unknown, you need to install the mesa utils and try again :

$ sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

So now that you confirmed that you have hardware DRI, let’s go ahead and turn our attention to Wine.

Wine stands for ‘Wine Is Not an Emulator’. So it is not an emulator. It is merely a layer between your windows apps and the linux environment, allowing them to run natively.

So, now we have to install Wine. Do this in a shell or use the program manager to install it :

$ sudo apt-get install Wine

After you installed it, it is time to download the WoW installer or install it from your disks.

Whatever method you choose, use the windows version to install it. You can find the online installer here.

Check the box 'Allow executing file as a program'.I will assume you downloaded it, and if you did, you need to first give it the executable bit by right-clicking the file and then go to the permissions tab. You can see what i mean on the image here to the left.

When you have set the execute bit, then you can make wine run it by rightclicking again and choosing ‘Open with Wine Windows Program Loader’.

I will assume everything went alright, and you get the installation screen, the EULA which you need to agree on etc. You can basically click through all that and install World of Warcraft like you would on a normal Windows PC.

After the complete installation, you will also have a new icon on your desktop called ‘World of Warcraft.desktop’ and its icon looks like a text file. This is actually the launcher for World of Warcraft, and you need to set the execute bit on it as well, just as you did with the installer executable earlier. When you do, the icon will change into the World of Warcraft icon that you expect.

Another thing you need to do, is get into the properties of the World of Warcraft launcher again and add -opengl to the commandline in it :

env WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Launcher.exe" -opengl

This will ensure that World of Warcraft will start in OpenGL mode, which runs a lot better than DirectX mode on Linux.

This is all you need to do ! Happy Gaming !

If you happen to be on the EU realms, visit me on The Sha’Tar sometime. I will be playing as Diaenaeira :)

VN:F [1.9.1_1087]
Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)
Installing and Playing World of Warcraft in Linux, revisited, 10.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings