This howto is for installing and playing World of Warcraft using Wine under Ubuntu.

Wine is a free open source implementation of the proprietary Win32 API, and attempts to enable Windows applications and games to run on Unix-like operating systems.

World of Warcraft can also be played under Ubuntu by using the Wine based CrossOver Games, Cedega and PlayOnLinux. This howto, however, does not address these.

Before you get started

In Linux, Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) facilitates faster graphics rendering, so before you begin the installation you should check whether DRI is enabled. To do this, run the following command:

glxinfo | grep rendering

You should see output similar to this:

direct rendering: Yes

If this line says "No", it means that graphics data will not be passed directly to the graphics hardware, thus significantly reducing speed at which WoW will run. This is usually caused by a configuration issue with the graphics card driver. See the troubleshooting section for elaboration.

Note though that even if you do have Direct Rendering, it might not be enough. If you graphics card is an Intel GMA, your performance will be low in any case. Most people who successfully play WoW on Ubuntu are probably using an NVIDIA or ATI card with proprietary drivers.

Installing Wine

The official deb package file of Wine from WineHQ's download page, is recommended for most users, as it works almost out of the box for most people, and has a platinum rating at the moment.

For full instructions on installing Wine see the Wine page.

Deb package

1. You can easily install Wine through the repositories. Ubuntu will automatically configure and install it for you. You can go to System, then Administration and Synaptic Package Manager, search for it and mark for installation.

You may also use the command line. Simply run:

sudo apt-get install wine

2. Before proceeding to install World of Warcraft you must run winecfg at least once (it must setup the ~/.wine directory structure before you can install Windows applications into it). This is a very important step. In a Terminal window type the following:

 winecfg

• Select your Windows type, configure the disk and removable drives, etc, then press Apply and Ok. As it closes, winecfg will create a .wine directory structure in your home folder, populating with information about drives and devices installed in your system. If you fail to do this before trying to install World of Warcraft then you'll probably see errors like the following when running winecfg in the future:

 err:winecfg:apply_drive_changes   unable to define devicename of 'C:'

Compiling Wine from source

Other experienced users, who are unable to make this work or just want more control over the installation, may want to try to compile Wine from source in order to play WoW. Instructions can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingWineFromSource

Installing World of Warcraft

If you have the installation discs, this guide recommend that you copy the contents of your discs to your hard disk and install WoW from there. If you have the new DVDs see the note below.

• Create a convenient directory ( 'wow_install' on your Desktop for example)
• Copy all of the files from the first WoW CD to this new directory.

• For each of the remaining WoW CD's, copy just the 'Installer Tome #.mpq' files. In the end, you should have the 'DirectX' directory, and the 'autorun.inf', 'installer.ico', 'Installer Tome.mpq', and 'Installer.exe' files from disc 1, and 'Installer Tome 2.mpq', 'Installer Tome 3.mpq', 'Installer Tome 4.mpq', and 'Installer Tome 5.mpq' from the remaining discs. Note that the 'Installer.exe' file on the first disc is different from the files of the same name on the subsequent discs; if you get the wrong one the install will fail with

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

• Note that on some WoW DVD's the installer executable is hidden and you need to re-mount the disc with the 'unhide' option. To do this type in a terminal:

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

• Start the installation by opening a terminal and running these commands:

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

  Replace <path-to-directory/> with the right path to the directory where you copied all the files above.

• To install expansions such as The Burning Crusade, The Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, repeat the instructions above. Keep in mind to make new folders for each expansion.

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 you have not already done so, you may want to install Microsoft's proprietary fonts, because they can solve some text related graphical glitches during installation.

Alternate Installation Methods

If the above isn't possible for some reason (you don't have the discs for example, or a working media drive), here are some alternate ways to install the game.

Installing in Windows

Just install WoW in Windows and run WoW under Wine from your Windows Partition. Or copy the entire World of Warcraft folder over from your Windows installation after installation to play from your Ubuntu partition.

Download the entire game

If you have lost a CD, do not have access to a CD drive or simply would not like to bother with patching and messing with the CD's, you can download and run the installer, which is in fact the full game almost fully patched, from the blizzard downloader. They work very nicely with Wine.

Installer Downloads:

US version: https://us.battle.net/account/download/

EU version: https://eu.battle.net/account/download/ (all languages)

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.

Configuration

Blizzard Downloader

The downloader can sometimes be slow or not work at all if the proper ports aren't open. The easiest way to open these ports is to use the firewall program Firestarter.

• From the command line, install Firestarter with this command: sudo apt-get install 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).

Router Configuration

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

Once the firewall is configured and the network port forwarding is working, run the downloader with (Burning Crusade US Version example):

wine WoW-BurningCrusade-enUS-Installer-downloader.exe

OpenGL or Direct3D

The Windows version of World of Warcraft supports 3D rendering using either Direct3D or OpenGL. However, in Wine the Direct3D mode is supported only through an emulation layer, that runs on top of OpenGL. Therefor this guide recommends that you enable the OpenGL mode directly, instead of using it indirectly through Direct3D. This works better for most people and as of patch 4.0.1 the game supports hardware cursor under OpenGL.

Enable OpenGL mode

Find the file wtf/Config.wtf in your main WoW directory. By default it is found in /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/, where <username> is you computer login name. Note that since .wine begins with a period, you will not be able to see it, but you may still access it in a terminal. In the Nautilus file manager, you can press Ctrl + h to see hidden files. If config.wtf does not exist, run the game and log into a character, then exit WoW. The game should then have created the file. Open it using a text editor, and add the following line to it:

SET gxApi "opengl"

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. Do this as it will enable the WoW Launcher to 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"

Gnome menu icon

You can make a Gnome menu entry for WoW by doing the following commands in a terminal:

wget http://kde-files.org/CONTENT/content-files/41569-wow-icon-scalable.svg -O WoW.svg
sudo mv WoW.svg /usr/share/pixmaps/
gksudo 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
Exec=wine /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WoW.exe
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/WoW.svg
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Game;
StartupNotify=false

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

Voice communication

Guilds in World of Warcraft sometimes use voice communication software to communicate with other guild members while playing. The most common application are:

• TeamSpeak

• Mumble

and

• Ventrilo

TeamSpeak and Mumble have native Linux clients and work perfectly under Ubuntu. Ventrilo on the other hand needs to be run through Wine (just like WoW), for more information see Ventrilo on Ubuntu.

Troubleshooting

Audio troubleshooting

If you experience stuttering you could try this:

In config.wtf set:

SET Sound_SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET Sound_SoundBufferSize "150"

The optimum value for Sound_SoundBufferSize varies depending on you setup. It may be anything from 50 to 300.

If you are no hearing any audio at all from WoW, you may want to try to switch Wine to use a an older audio sub system named OSS. To do this, just type winecfg in a terminal, press enter, and the wine configuration application window should appear and you should go to the audio tab. In there, choose OSS. Make sure you only have one sound output system (e.g. ALSA/OSS/ESD) ticked at a time.

When an application is outputing sound through OSS, it will cause conflicts with other applications outputing audio, because OSS can only output audio from one application at a time. To work around this issue, you can wrap your running WoW/Wine instance with the never audio system using the padsp launch prefix in a terminal. Start wine by typing:

padsp wine WoW.exe

rather than just

wine WoW.exe

Graphics troubleshooting

If you are having trouble with your graphics, here is a few tweaks you could try.

Config.wtf

Add the following to Config.wtf:

SET ffxDeath "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"

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

If you experience a problem with missing character and object models, and/or the login windows background is black, add:

SET M2UseShaders "0"

regedit tweaks

This is a simple registry edit for Wine that either will either fix crash issues and increase frame rate in game, or it will decrease the performance and even make the game crash. You should give it a try to see what is does for you, as you may always easily remove it again, if it acts negatively for you.

Open a terminal window, type regedit and press enter. This will start the Wine equivalent of the windows registry editor. If you are familiar with using the registry editor under windows then this is pretty much the same.

1. Find this key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\

2. Highlight the wine folder in the left hand pane by clicking left on it. The icon should change to an open folder

3. Right-click on the wine folder and select [NEW] then [KEY]

4. Replace the text New Key #1 with OpenGL

5. Right-click in the right hand pane and select [NEW] then [String Value]

6. Replace New Value #1 with DisabledExtensions (Notice it's case sensitive!)

7. Then double click anywhere on the line, a dialog box will open.

8. In the value field type GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object

More troubleshooting can be found at WorldofWarcraft/Troubleshooting.

Support and discussion

For support and discussion on the subject of this howto, please post at:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=579378

External links

• WineAppDB - World of Warcraft - The World of Warcraft page on WineHQ.

• Wine (WoWWiki) - A WoWWiki guide for running World of Warcraft under Wine.

• World of Warcraft/Wine - The Gentoo wiki World of Warcraft page.

CategoryGames