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Wine (software)

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Wine
Releases
Stable release1.0.1 (17 October 2008)
Unstable release1.1.9 (21 November 2008)
Links
AppDBAppDB: WoW 3.0.x
WineHQwinehq.org
Latest commits

Wine is a free software application which aims to allow Unix-like operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows. (Wikipedia)

This is a how-to-guide for installing and playing World of Warcraft using Wine under a Linux kernel based operating system. This guide has some limited compatibility with the BSD family of open source Unix based operating systems as well.

Contents

Introduction

This guide is largely based on text based commands to a command prompt, also called a terminal, console and the CLI. This is mostly because there are so many different Linux distributions, and they do not have a common graphical user interface (GUI), making it almost impossible to create point and click instructions that would cover all of them, while the terminal commands are pretty uniform across them all.

Before you begin the installation, you should run the following simple command, which will check whether your video card driver has DRI enabled, which allows WoW to run much faster (you may need to install package mesa-utils): 

glxinfo | grep rendering

Which should return a line similar to this:

direct rendering: Yes

If this line says "No", it means that the graphics data will be handled in software rather than directly by the graphics hardware, thus significantly reducing speed at which WoW will run. Thankfully if you are using relatively recent hardware, enabling DRI is usually just a configuration issue.

For more information about enabling DRI, refer to the information from your distribution's support guides on graphic card driver installation. For extended personal help, forums and chatrooms are usually a good bet. Just tell them what the Make and Model of your graphic card is and they will be able to point you in the right direction. As always, remember that search engines are your friend.

Distro native instructions

Before you use this guide to install and configure WoW and Wine, you should note that there exist instructions for some specific distributions:

Installing Wine

Distro specific methods

Different GNU/Linux distributions use different methods of installing software, which oftentimes makes it hard to make easy installation options available for all distributions, especially for large and complex projects like Wine. Luckily a lot of energy has been put into making the distribution native installation methods available for a large variety of popular distributions. Please see http://www.winehq.org/site/download and follow the installation directions for your particular distribution.

Compiling Wine

If you were unable to install Wine with a method found on that site, or if you are an experienced user wanting more control over the installation, then you may want to look into compiling Wine from source code. See the WineHQ wiki for information: http://wiki.winehq.org/Recommended_Packages

Installing WoW

This section explains four different methods of installing WoW. If the first method doesn't work for you, or you prefer a different approach, then simply skip to the next method and so on.

Method 1. Install from CDs

If you're lucky you can properly run the installation from the cds, which require that you are able to change between them while the installation runs.

Simply put disc 1 in the CD or DVD drive, and do the following (replace /media/cdrom0 with wherever you mount your cds): 

wine /media/WoWDisc1/Installer.exe

Some dialogs during installation may appear blank or garbled, and the installer may even hang for up to 5 minutes at 100% CPU, while appearing to be doing nothing. Simply wait and click next when possible.

Note: If the text is too small, and it annoys you: Please install msttcorefonts per instruction of your distribution.

If everything works like it should, then the installation will run for a while and then ask for disc 2, you change CDs and it should continue until it asks for the next one and so forth, if it doesn't work, however, you will continue to receive the "Please insert Disc 2" Warning repeatedly, you should first wait a minute to make sure the CD mounted and try again, and if it still doesn't work, skip to method two.

If you have problems ejecting CDs in wine try: Start winecfg, then select Drives, auto detect drives The you'll probably get a Drive Letter like L: /media/WoWDisc1/ Now you can use wine eject L: Then press the eject button on your CD/DVD drive. For the next CD you'll have to run wincfg again and substitute /media/WoWDisc1/ to ... WoWDisc2 and so on. So the wine eject will work without a Problem.

No Installer.exe?

This is primarily an Ubuntu problem, but may appear on other distributions as well. Run the following command from a terminal: 

 sudo mount -t iso9660 -o ro,unhide /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom0/

Method 2. Copy CDs to HD

Create a new folder on your computer. Copy all of the files from the first CD and all but the Installer.exe file from the rest to this directory on your hard drive (overwrite when prompted). Copying the Installer.exe from the other CD's will cause the install to fail with 

Unrecognized key "options". (AttributeParser::Parse)

Then run: 

cd /<path-to-directory>/
wine Installer.exe

Replace <path-to-directory> with the right path to the directory where you copied all the files. You should now have the installation running, but make sure the CD media is out of the drive or it will check there and you'll be stuck in it again.

Method 3. Copy or run from Win

You can also just install WoW in Windows and then copy the entire World of Warcraft folder over from your Windows installation.

Or if you've already got WoW installed on your Windows partition, you can just use Wine to launch WoW directly from this installation. There is an added benefit to doing this, if you actively multiboot between Linux and Windows, because you will only need to have one copy of WoW on your hard drive for it to run in both environments. Please keep in mind that you must have both read and write access to your Windows partition for this to work, and only the most recently released GNU/Linux distributions, are currently providing write access to NTFS (Windows XP) partitions out of the box. If you do not have write access to your NTFS partition, you will need to consult with your distributions documentation for directions on enabling the NTFS-3G driver, which adds this feature.

Note: Using this method results in there being no entries for WoW in Wine's registry, but this does not cause any issues at all with running WoW.

Note 2 : Some computers might experience low FPS , while trying to run WoW in opengl mode . In that case , removing Config.wtf file ( it is localised in WTF folder ) , running WoW to generate that file again , and then making changes ( to opengl mode ) might help. Make sure , to give read/write access to WTF folder ( otherwise WoW will crash )

Method 4. Download client

Or if you have lost a CD, do not have access to a cd drive or simply would not want to bother with patching and messing with the CD's, you can download the trial version, which is in fact the full game almost fully patched, from the blizzard torrentlike downloader. They work very nicely with wine. You may be asked to log in with your WoW account.

All European WoW clients in all languages:

US Version:

In order to use the Blizzard Downloader effectively, you must 1) open certain ports on your computer and 2) enable port forwarding on your router.

  1. The easiest way to open these ports is to use the open-source firewall program Firestarter. When it is running, select the "Policy" tab, right-click in the Allow Service area, and select Add Rule. Under port, type 6112 and make sure that the "Anyone" radio button is selected. Make a note in the comments field that this port relates to Blizzard. Repeat these steps for ports 3724 and for the range 6881-6999 (which will be recognized as BitTorrent ports).
  2. Next, configure your router to forward those ports on the router to your computer only. The steps are similar to the above, but vary slightly from router to router and may be found on Blizzard's website: http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww01199p

Configuration tweaks

Notice: Please follow this section carefully for best results!

Disabling pixel shaders

It seems since an early beta 3.0.2 patch, pixel shaders have been causing extreme troubles on nVidia cards:

For a work around, open up winecfg, go to the Graphics tab and untick the box "Allow pixel shaders". You may see a significant performance gain. Also see below for further tweaks.

Config.wtf

WoW uses DirectX by default, but for most people it will not perform well in this mode (usually on nVidia hardware). If this is the case for you, then you should change it to run in OpenGL mode instead. To do this you need to find the file Config.wtf in your WoW directory. By default it is found in 

"${HOME}/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/"

where ${HOME} is your home directory. If the file does not exist, run the game and log into a character. The game should then create the file. Open it using a text editor, and add the following line to it: 

SET gxApi "opengl"

The file is found in the wtf directory in your main WoW directory.

If you experience poor performance, graphical glitches, or the game doesn't run at all, then add the following options as well: 

SET ffxDeath "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"
SET ffxSpecial "0"

Note that disabling ffxGlow may also enable antialiasing for some users.

If you experience stuttering, bad sound or no sound what so ever, then add the following options as well: 

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "150"

To start the game in a full-screen window that can be easily alt-tabbed back to your other programs, insert: 

SET gxMaximize "1"
SET gxWindow "1"

winecfg

If you experience stuttering, bad sound or no sound what so ever, then you must try a few things in winecfg. Just type winecfg in a terminal, press enter, and the winecfg window should appear and you should go to the audio tab.

For most people OSS will work better than ALSA, so you should make sure that only OSS is ticked. But for some ALSA works better, so try that as a second solution, make sure you only have one ticked at a time.

Also, refer to the Voice chat section for information on getting multiple audio streams working with OSS and ALSA (more than one program using audio at once). It will save you grief should you ever want to listen to music and chat on Ventrilo or Teamspeak while playing, and similar.

You may also try ticking "Driver Emulation". Remove it again if it doesn't help.


Memory exhaustion patch (preloader.c)

As of 3.0.2, an unknown bug is causing repeated crashes on some nVidia cards, all related to memory corruption or exhaustion. See comments in bug 16131 to find and apply the patch and for more information. You will need a clone of the wine.git repository.

Playing

Start from the Desktop Icon

Double click the icon you find on your Desktop titled World of Warcraft, this will start the launcher. If you have never used something requiring HTML rendering with Wine you will be prompted to download and install the Gecko rendering engine, you should do this as it will enable the WoW Launcher to do display news.

Start from the Terminal

Starting from the terminal is simple, just enter: 

wine "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Launcher.exe"

(install when prompted about the Gecko rendering engine)

Or, dive right into the game with: 

wine "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe"

Be certain to add -opengl to the command if you didn't add the gxApi line as described in the Config.wtf section above.

Gnome menu icon

You can make a Gnome menu entry by doing the following commands in a terminal (you will need superuser/root rights): 

wget http://images.wikia.com/wowwiki/images/d/d3/Wow-icon-scalable.svg
mv Wow-icon-scalable.svg /usr/share/icons/
gedit /usr/share/applications/wow.desktop

Add this to the text editor window, which should have appeared after the third command, change <username> in the Exec= line to your computer login username, and save: 

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=World of Warcraft
Name[hr]=World of Warcraft
Exec=wine /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WoW.exe
Icon=Wow-icon-scalable.svg
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Game;
StartupNotify=false

Remember that you should also edit the Exec= line to reflect your WoW installation path, if you've installed to a special location.

Troubleshooting

The troubleshooting section has been moved to its own article for better overview and navigation: Linux/Wine/Troubleshooting

Config.wtf

Depending on your graphic card and drivers, WoW may or may not run out of the box. The following Config.wtf file sets a few important values which will make WoW run in an ideal, windowed, environment. 

SET [[CVar gxApi|gxApi]] "opengl"
SET [[CVar gxCursor|gxCursor]] "0"
SET [[CVar gxFixLag|gxFixLag]] "0"
SET [[CVar gxResolution|gxResolution]] "1024x768"
SET [[CVar gxWindow|gxWindow]] "1"
SET [[CVar movie|movie]] "1"
SET [[CVar readEULA|readEULA]] "1"
SET [[CVar readScanning|readScanning]] "-1"
SET [[CVar readTOS|readTOS]] "1"
SET [[CVar Sound_OutputDriverName|Sound_OutputDriverName]] "System Default"
SET [[CVar Sound_VoiceChatInputDriverName|Sound_VoiceChatInputDriverName]] "System Default"
SET [[CVar Sound_VoiceChatOutputDriverName|Sound_VoiceChatOutputDriverName]] "System Default"
SET [[CVar videoOptionsVersion|videoOptionsVersion]] "1"

The following values will also disable a few options which you'll likely want to reenable later on if they work. 

SET [[CVar pixelShaders|pixelShaders]] "1"

If you have a dual core (or more) system, you may want to also add the following line: 

SET [[CVar coresDetected|coresDetected]] "2"

Extra Tips/Interesting Things

For other relevant miscellaneous information and tips and tricks please see Linux/Wine/Misc

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