wow and ubuntu howto

by Alexander Vassbotn Røyne

11:46:32 Thursday, August 16 2007

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wow and ubuntu howto

published: 11:46:32 Thursday, August 16 2007, updated: 14:54:24 Sunday, March 30 2008, modified: 14:55:06 Sunday, March 30 2008

wow and ubuntu howto

UPDATE

If you have a newer laptop than the one I tried this on, like DELL XPS 1330M, and you use the latest Ubuntu and Wine, this works perfectly!

The only thing that kept me moving completely away from an OS from Microsoft was the gaming side of me. My name is Alexander, and I am a gamer. I enjoy RPGs, MMORPGs, RTS, FPS and the list goes on. There are many games out there for GNU/Linux nowadays, in form of a port or, simply just made for GNU/Linux; Freeciv (a great Civilization II look-a-like), Unreal Tournament 2004 (specially made for Mac, Windows and Linux) and so on.

Now, back to the topic at hand, as you might have thought, I play World of Warcraft. And now comes the question: Do GNU/Linux support World of Warcraft (or any popular games) natively? The answer is no, nada, niente, jamais, non. Sigh.

The attempt

I've been trying several windows emulators and programs (wine, winex, cedega) to make World of Warcraft run seamingless on a GNU/Linux distro. The most successful attempt was last week, on my Dell d620 laptop with Ubuntu Studio (Feisty Fawn 7.04). How did I do it? Well, first I updated and installed the latest wine release:

sudo apt-get install wine

Then I logged on my account on http://www.wow-europe.com/ us flag and downloaded the World of Warcraft Classic installer and the Burning Crusade installer. Then I simply double clicked the installer and watched the install commence.

wow install 001

wow install 002

wow install 003

wow install 004

wow install 005

wow install 006

the solution?

It wasn't really to much to it than that. Or, so I thought. The Intel 945 graphic drivers on my laptop didnt support OpenGl so good, or D3D.. Even if I my glxgears score is over 1200 fps, it didn't do me no good. I tried to find solutions for this, but I kept banging my had against the wall until I stumbled over another solution. Windows. Not the direct use of it, but here's the deal; Install your World of Warcraft on the Windows partition you have on your machine. I know that most of you runs dualboot (I KNOW, just ADMIT IT!) with windows, so that shouldn't be a problem. When you have installed it, you can go to the World of Warcraft directory on your NTFS/FAT32 partition and doubleclick WoW.exe. It works like a charm. How? I believe that the installment on the Windows partition provides better support than an install on a fake Windows partition. Oh well, it works.

Oh, and as a little closer to this post; There's a petition out there for Blizzard us flag to make a World of Warcraft port, I hope you will sign up!

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