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 tinkering and toying with this Ventrilo program for over a week (and complaining why people dont just use TeamSpeak for pity sake ! It has a native Linux client, come on.) I finally managed to get the thing working on Ubuntu 8.04 with standard ALSA etc.

First thing you need to do, is make sure everything works with the sound system. That means, speakers are configured right, but also confirming that the (built-in if you use a laptop) microphone works as well.

To get this done, you might have to take a look at this page, but obviously i will not cover getting your sound cards to work on every system possible. This entry is about getting Ventrilo to work, and hopefully a comprehensive guide at that. This also means that this guide assumes that you have Wine installed and properly working ! If you haven’t done that yet, get it done first.

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I have been toying and searching a lot lately on the net and with EVE itself, and i think i found the solution for it. That means, someone else already has found a working solution and I just reinvented the wheel (story of my life) and I am just reposting it and explaining it here.

(update : There is even an official bugreport and solution in the comments here. It’s not where i picked it up, but this whole story seems to be there as well. Thanks for providing me with a link Dan !)

For the record, I want to state again that the CrossOver project, which is the commercial frontend of Wine, and Wine itself are 2 amazing projects, and all i can say is that the coders, planners, executives, CEO etc, have my sincere respect. Up to now, things have worked flawlessly and I encourage anyone out there to just spend that little stash of coin on CrossOver. It’s a one time donation if you don’t want the support year after year and the money goes straight into the project, which is well worth it, and you buy yourself a whole lot of -ease of use- and manageability for it, plus timely and polite support that actually knows how to fix your problems. Ask any CrossOver user and they will tell you the same.

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Since installing and running EVE with CrossOver was such a success, i decided to ditch the standard Wine installation alltogether and switch entirely to CrossOver. So that meant byebye .wine folder and start completely over again.

World of Warcraft is also a supported application, so i figured i just download the webinstaller again and use that as the setup to run in CrossOver. So, to put down the steps : I fired up ‘Install Windows Software’ from the CrossOver Games menu and told it I wanted to install World of Warcraft. For the setup file i chose the one i downloaded from the internet, and well whatd’ya know, it fired it up nicely and i could click the install button. Read more

I ran into some trouble with EVE running under plain Wine, meaning that i experienced some freak lockups of the game, of course usually in the heat of battle and not safely in a station. Can someone please shoot Murphy while we are at it ? Thank you !.

Anyway, since I recently (few hours ago actually) obtained a license to use Crossover Professional and Crossover Games, I thought i’d give it a swirl and see how the installing process of EVE goes in that. Looking at the whole installation process under plain Wine and the effort it took to get it running and working out all the quirks, I’m guessing that it can be a much more trivial task, but hey, let’s have a look at it shall we ? Read more