Howto's, experiences and more

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.

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After some happy surfing, i kept running into people saying they used something called ‘Crossover’, and after a while i got curious about what that Crossover thing actually was. Well, to my surprise, it seemed to be another commercial Wine spinoff.

After being initially put off seeing the mention of ‘Commercial’, ‘Open Source’ and ‘Linux’ in one sentence, i decided to put aside my prejudices and actually read what they had to say for themselves. In short it came down to this : Crossover is a commercial project that is built upon the opensource project Wine. When you buy Crossover you get a really neat and nifty user interface for wine and a lot of neat and nifty ways to run Windows Applications. Plus : You get support and all their developments go straight to the Wine project as well. So there you have it : Opensource benifitting from commercial solutions ! Eutopia -does- exist ! Read more

Yes ! It’s very well possible to run Windows games on Linux these days.

There is one downside to this good news : Not all games run as well as some do and some don’t even run at all. That said, there are 2 games I like to play at the moment, being World of Warcraft and EVE. Both quite different and both quite Windows.

Now EVE actually has Linux support, being that the game is able to be ran with something called CEDEGA. Well, I looked up on CEDEGA, and it’s a WINE spinoff that became closed source and you have to pay a subscription fee for it. That’s not so bad if the support of the software is great and it runs anything you want. Truth is, that is not the case and there is many disgruntled less-technical users out there that would be happy to get rid of CEDEGA and switch to the free, opensource solution for it, WINE. There are even (multiple) stories of CEDEGA not responding at all to support requests and only getting into action when said subscriber cancelled his subscription. That was it for me, no way am I going to pay for a shitty service using a software package that has it’s roots ‘loaned’ from an opensource project.

So, obviously, with users experience with CEDEGA in mind, and seeming WINE is also the harder path of choice, I naturally chose to run my 2 favorites with WINE and see how far i can go with it.

By the end of this blogline i hope I will have provided you with enough knowledge to run your games under Linux and enjoy getting it there as much as I did. Read more