World of Warcraft in Wine Success
Ok, I made a topic on this a long time ago and hadn't yet gotten it working, but now that I have I've written a walkthrough explaining it for those of you who want to know, here's a copy.
I've been playing WoW for about a month now, and in that time I've been working on getting it to run properly in Linux. I know that Blizzard doesn't officially support Linux, but I thought I'd post this for those of you who use Linux and want to be able to play WoW when you're in Linux. I've read topic upon topic of people not being able to get it to work, and after finding the official support on the wine website and combining it with information from a few other sites, I managed to get mine to work. I'm going to use this post on the subject to explain exactly how I went about doing it. Keep in mind that none of the issues I've read about are present after following this procedure. The mini-map works fine under all conditions, no flickering, no skewed buildings or anything. Screenshot I will try to make this walkthrough as Linux-noob-friendly as possible. This walkthrough is assuming you have all of the dependencies installed(gcc etc.), because most linux distributions do by default. If you run into a dependency error, you can see the full version of this walkthrough that I used myself on the Wine WoW database to find out what you are missing. Ok, first off I think my relevent system information is necessary: OS: Fedora Core 5 Linux Kernel: 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 i686 Video Card: 256 MB NVidia GeForce FX 5500 Wine Version: 0.9.21 Processor: 2.2 Ghz Intel Celeron RAM: 1 GB DDR1 SDRAM Preparing for Wine For those of you who do not know, Wine is a Windows compatability layer, designed to help Linux users run Windows only programs on *nix systems, and newer versions of it has implemented better and better support for DirectX9. Ok, first off, open your package manager, remove all of the wine packages you have installed, and then go into your /home directory and remove the ".wine" folder. It's hidden, so if you don't see it right away you may want to either type it directly or tell your file browser to show hidden files. The reason you do not install wine via your package manager is because there are patches that need to be applied before wine is compiled. Next, you need to download the source code for wine. This walkthrough will assume you are using the same version as me, 0.9.21(the latest when this was written), and may not work if you use a different version. Click here to download wine version 0.9.21 Download the .tar.bz2 file to a directory, preferably your home directory or a subdirectory of it. Then open your command line and run these commands: Code:
cd directoryofarchivehere Code:
tar xvfj nameofarchivehere Code:
cd foldernamehere Now, if you are running an NVidia video card, you need to download this file into your new wine folder. If you are running an ATi card, you need to download this file into that wine folder. Now, depending on which type of video card you have, you need to run one of the following commands(also in the same terminal window that is still cd'd into the wine source code folder). NVidia Cards Code:
patch -p1 < wine-wow-0.9.21.diff Code:
patch -p0 < x11drv_fbconfig_fix-0001.bin Still in the same command line window that is cd'd into the wine sourcecode folder, run this command: Code:
./configure When the configure process is complete and you are returned to a command prompt, you need to run: Code:
make depend Code:
make Code:
su Code:
make install Normally at this point you would run winecfg, but when I did I couldn't read anything because I did not have any fonts (hence the previous FontForge error) installed. To solve this issue if you have a Windows hard drive or computer sitting around, you need to get on it and go to C:\Windows\Fonts and copy all of the files in there to the .wine/drive_c/windows/fonts folder in your home directory. Remember it's hidden. After you do this run: Code:
winecfg Enable Desktop Double Buffering Allow the Window Manager to control windows(This is important because if a fullscreen application freezes, you can alt+tab out of it.) Set the "Vertext Shader Support" to "Hardware" and check the box that says "Allow Pixel Shader if supported by hardware". In audio the reported best sound output system to use is "OSS". I have hardware acceleration set to "Full", Default Sample Rate set to "22050", and Default bits per sample set to "16". It would also be wise to double check the "Drives" tab and make sure everything is mapped to the proper location, it should be by default but just in case. Getting Some Windows .dll Files You need to download these two .dll files to your .wine/drive_c/windows folder. If you can't do that directly because of it being hidden, you can download them to a separate location and then move them. Keep in mind these files come in an archive format and will need to be unzipped. msvcp60.dll mfc42.dll Now open a command line and cd into the .wine/drive_c/windows folder and run these commands. Code:
unzip mfc42.zip Code:
unzip msvcp60.zip Installing Mozilla ActiveX Control You can download the ActiveX control here. We want the .exe version so go ahead and download it and run it. If you get a warning about it being a windows executable file and security risks, you can manually run the file in your command line with: Code:
wine pathtothefilehere Installing World of Warcraft If you have the CDs for WoW you can use them to install, if you don't, you can download a zipped version of the WoW installer here. The installation process should run normally, however I used the download and not the CDs and have heard of issues with the computer not recognizing one CD or another, but as far as I know it "should" work just fine. Configuring World of Warcraft Before ever opening World of Warcraft there are some changes to be made before it will be playable. Go into the folder where World of Warcraft installed (probably .wine/drive_c/program files/world of warcraft) and open the folder named "WTF" and then open the file "Config.wtf" with a text editor, and add these lines to the bottom of the file: Code:
SET gxApi "opengl" That's not all. If the shortcut supposedly installed to your desktop is there, you need to edit it. Depending on your desktop environment that may be done different ways, but find the box that lists the command it runs to actually execute wow. Probably looks like "wine '/home/yourusername/.wine/drive_c/program files/world of warcraft/launcher.exe'" or something. Anyway, go to the main end of this command and enter a space and -opengl. For example to properly edit the command I listed above it would then be: Code:
wine '/home/marcus/.wine/drive_c/program files/world of warcraft/launcher.exe' -opengl That's all there is to it. After following these steps I can play World of Warcraft flawlessly on my Linux box, no sound jitters, no horribly skewed buildings like before. If you follow these steps and it works, please let me know so I can make this walkthrough more available, but as this is how "I" did it on "my" hardware, I'm not sure how it will work for other people, and therefore I don't want go screaming "I can make it work!" and then not be able to make it work, lol. Because this walkthrough is unofficial, neither I, nor Blizzard, nor Codeweavers are responsible for any damage done to your operating system while following the instructions contained herein. If you follow these steps and it doesn't work, post a reply and let me know or send me an e-mail at marcusdean.adams@gmail.com . Also don't be afraid to use google, it's how I found all the resources I've given here and all the information I used to get it working for me. Happy questing World of Warcraft players! |
I've been trying to install wow for some time, though originally it was on Debian 64, which I unfortunately blew up. So now I'm running Fedora 5, and this is much easier to use for my purposes. This is a great walkthrough, pretty well detailed, though I am having trouble installing wow. I keep getting this error when i try to unzip the installer I downloaded from file planet:
Code:
unzip World_of_Warcraft_Trial_Client_FP.zip Quote:
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Try opening the zip file with an archive manager like ark(if you're running KDE) or file roller(if you're running gnome). I've heard of issues with it always asking for the second disc, but to be honest I'm not really sure what to do about it, you could try googling it though if using fileroller or ark doesn't work in extracting the archive.
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Well I managed to get the installer I downloaded to unzip by installing winzip. Strange, but unzip and file roller wouldn't unzip it. They both gave that error I listed in my last post. Anyways it unzipped and it installed, but when I went into the WTF folder to edit Config.wtf, the folder was empty. Launching at this point just simply crashed with a blank screen. I tried creating the file Config.wtf and adding the lines you listed, and this led to sound being on the blank screen, but nothing else. I could hear the sound from the blizzard logo, but was unable to do anything. This eventually seemed to crash as well. So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling wow, but the WTF folder is still empty. Any idea what to try next? Was thinking maybe i could a copy of the contents of the WTF folder from a windows machine or something and try adding that to my folder.
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I'm in Windows right now, but here are the contents of my config.wtf file. Try making one with this, plus the lines I put in the walkthrough and see if it works.
Also just to make sure your OpenGL is working properly, run the command "glxgears". This should just show a little window with some 3-d gears turning, if they're turning alright, then your OpenGL is fine, if they're jerky or don't appear at all, this could indicate either an issue with your video card driver or your OpenGL installation. Code:
SET hwDetect "0" |
Well I figured out how to get it to launch. I found this link:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:...ient=firefox-a Basically I had to add a resolution setting to the Config.wtf file like this: Code:
SET gxResolution "1280x1024" Quote:
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If the fonts are still really tiny even after copying the fonts from a Windows PC, try using your package manager to install FontForge (in the command line it's yum -y install FontForge). Make sure you capitalize the F's, a friend of mine tried and tried to install fontforge, and it kept saying package not found, until he installed "FontForge", lol. To fix the sound issue also make sure in your winecfg, the audio driver is set to OSS, it's rumored to be the best one for wine and I've never had an issue out of it. Also make sure that in addition to adding the opengl line to the config.wtf file that when you launch it you are launching it with the -opengl option. ( i.e. wine '$HOME/.wine/drive_c/program files/World of Warcraft/wow.exe' -opengl ) I've got that line in my config.wtf file, and if I try to launch it without the -opengl option, it still tries to emulate DirectX and the buildings look all screwed up, :P. You might also want to keep in mind that the since we're emulating WoW in a false Windows environment, the game becomes more taxing on your system than it would if you were running it from a native Linux binary, so you will experience a performance difference unless you have a kickass system. On my system, it's perfectly playable, but especially when I go into big areas like the Barrens or Battlegrounds, I notice a drop in framerate that isn't there when I play in Windows. So if after you get the game running it doesn't run as smooth as you think it should, that's probably why.
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I'm going to see if I can write an automated installer for WoW using python. If I could get a working installer to do all of this automatically, it would make things a lot easier for us, :P. I've already gotten a start on it, I'll let you know if I can get it to a working status.
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How do the FPS differ in Linux compared to Windows ?
I duel boot now and would love to be able to run on just Linux. I was not happy with the Famerate hit in Cedega From transgaming. Thanks for the feed back. |
Well crud, I seem to have gone backwards since last night. Yesterday I could launch the game, get a black screen and some fairly choppy sound. Now today, when I try to launch the game I get it frozen trying to resize the screen and with horribly choppy sound. When i tried to run glxgears again it crashed my system too! Now I'm really lost about it. The gears worked fine up until I just tried them a few moments ago. Before, the launcher would crash out with a memory read error from wine, but I can't recreate it now. I did install fontforge (which was in the gui installer as fontforge lowercase). At this point I'm not sure what';s up, I know I had good drivers before, I installed them myself just last week. And I have been using the -opengl in my launcher. Do you think this might be a hardware issue? I'm using an ATI x800XL pci-e graphics card, and a built in soundcard on my DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D mainboard with an amd athlon 3200+ cpu and 1GB RAM. Any ideas what to try next?
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Try googling for issues with ATi cards, I'm using an NVidia GeForce FX 5500, and I've heard of some issues with ATi cards. Check the url to the wine WoW app database in the walkthrough and see if it's got what you need.
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Well I checked into the wine db a bit and tried a few changes. I set the soundbuffer to 232 instead of 150 which seemed to help a little bit with the sound. The db also said to put the mfc42.dll into the system32 folder, one step below the windows folder like you suggested. Not sure if that will change anything, but it didn't the first time i tried that so i put it back into the windows folder. Next the db suggested a different launcher for Fedora:
Code:
# setarch i386 -L wine WoW.exe -opengl Quote:
Gah damn smilies, that's supposed to be fixme : powprof : DllMain minus the spaces between the colons. |
Quote:
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Well just a few moments ago I took the files msvcp60.dll and mfc42.dll out of the Windows directory and put them into the system32 dir in Windows. When I launched with
Code:
setarch i386 -L wine WoW.exe -opengl Quote:
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Ouch, I'm not sure when it happened, but they've updated the wine version, and removed the patches for the old version, so this whole topic is now obsolete. I'm glad they updated and have some improved support, but I'm kinda pissed at the same time cause' I've got to completely revise this installer I'm working on for it, lol.
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