Howto: WOW with Wine (help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft)

[Phaze08]

Well, it worked perfectly fine on windows and I can see the chat bubbles, but theyre just blank instead of having text in them. If everything else works good, I may just turn off the bubbles because they tend to get in the way in dungeons/etc.

Edit: One more thing, I cant access the battle.net news on my launcher. Is there a way to fix that?

[cwwilson721]

Actually, it IS your wine install (kind of).

For the 8400GS, there is NO registry 'tweak' needed, nor would one help.

The other issue that you mentioned, the 'news' issue, is because you installed IE into your wine install, right?

To make your WoW wine install 'stock' again, you can try the following:

(NOTE: DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! It WILL remove ALL wine programs installed in the default .wine folder!)

• Make a copy of your '~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft folder, ONLY. NOT IN YOUR .WINE FOLDER! No other folders are needed to be copied to get WoW to work. If you wish to copy anything else, put it somewhere else. A separate drive for your WoW backup/copy is best, but as long as it's NOT under the .wine folder, you should be OK)
• Delete your .wine folder (MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP!)
• Run 'winecfg' in a terminal. It will recreate a 'bare' wine install. Let it also install Gecko if it asks (gecko is what displays you news feed. No Gecko, or if you install IE, then no news feed. Speaking from years of experience...lol)
• Copy the backup you made back to where it was originally.

Your 'Wine" menu under Applications won't be affected, nor any other launchers you made.

If you run WoW/wine 'stock and bare', everything should work. WoW/wine requires (with 1.3 wine, running in 'XP mode' for sound to guarantee work, and an Nvidia card/chip) no additional 'tweaks' to run, except changing your in-game settings to low, because of your card/chip. And I mean LOW. Not just the 'slider', but all your video settings. No AA, no shadows, no NOTHING. View distance will kill the FPS, too. You can always raise individual settings later to find what you think is acceptable.

When you install other programs into your 'wow' install of wine, like IE, things get borked. And if you need Vent, DON'T. Install Mangler. Works better, because it's a Linux-native client.

Also, your 8400GS is REAL SLOW for Cata level games (Better than Intel, but barely). Good luck trying to do more than a 5man, even with everything at low (Believe me, I know. I have one.)

If you have other programs that you HAVE to run under wine, run WoW in a separate WINEPREFIX (Explanation here)

Good luck

[Phaze08]

SO your saying I need to make a separate folder for WoW and just tell it to run from there? After I do a fresh install of wine? Also, I've ran with this gpu all through wrath, doing 25ms even with not much trouble. But its going to be slower because of wine, am I right? Sorry, Im new to linux lol.

Edit: Also, are you ABSOLUTELY sure I dont need registry edit? Cuz I took it out and even with everything turned town im getting around 13fps walking in a not busy part of town, where before I was in the 30s while flying in a crowded area.

[cwwilson721]

Do as you wish. Either run in separate "wow-wine" folder, and edit the laucher command to run from there, or redo the default wine folder (This is NOT reinstalling wine. This is just creating the settings that wine needs to run. To reinstall wine, you need to remove the packages, then reinstall through apt-get or whatever. There is no need in this case).

But if you run WoW 'bare', it will work. Add the registry 'fixes' if you want. Just don't ADD ANY OTHER WINDOWS APPS TO YOUR WOW INSTALL.

There are a few reasons for this.

• Other apps (IE is a GREAT example) can/do mess up some WoW 'features' (Like the news launcher). WoW runs great all by itself.
• SECURITY/CONFIGURATION! More apps= more ways for things to go goofy. (Yes, wine CAN run some malware and virus things. In this vein, NEVER surf from within wine). If there are less reasons for things to go wrong, it's easier to figure out what the issue is (Ex: I installed wine 1.3.20 earlier today from a repo, and it made the mouse act like 'click to move'. I was getting dizzy spinning in circles. Since it affected all wine apps, I uninstalled that version, and installed 1.3.19, and all is fine. If I had 6-7 apps installed there, I would NOT know what to start with. Was it app foo, fee, or fye? Well, since it was WoW that messed up, and I knew the ONLY change I made from working to not was an upgrade to wine, it was an easy fix.
• It makes thing easierr to uninstall/reinstall if an app goes kablooey IF it is in it's own folder/install. I think it's easier to just delete the app folder, run 'winecfg', and reinstall that ONE app than have to do the same for 5-6 of them.
  
  As an aside, what 'reg tweaks' did you do? (A link would be good. I'm ALWAYS on the lookout to get my WoW even higher FPS)

[Tweak42]

SO your saying I need to make a separate folder for WoW and just tell it to run from there?

Wow fortunately operates needing only it's installed directory and none else therefore it's not going to complain it's missing something if you move it around. So here's a useful tip for wow directory management when messing with various wine versions and prefixes.

Using symbolic linking, you can put WoW directory anywhere and just link it into the "drive_c" in a .wine prefix folder. Wine will see just like it was physically located there, and if you delete the prefix your wow directory is unaffected. I do this because I accidentally deleted the wrong prefix once and it took my wow install with it.

For example linked from another drive:

/home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Wow  -->  /media/sdd1/Wow

Then the launch command is simply:

wine "C:\Wow\Wow.exe"

Or linked to prefix ".wine-wow":

/home/<username>/.wine-wow/drive_c/Wow  -->  /media/sdd1/Wow

Then use launch command:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/<username>/.wine-wow" wine "C:\Wow\Wow.exe"

(Search if you want to do the cmd line way)
Creating symbolic links in file manager:

1. Hit F3 for 2 pane mode
2. Ctrl-H to unhide . directories
3. Browse to the two directories
4. ctrl-shift drag directory link from one to other

I have used symlinking to run wow off a separate small solid state drive (fast loading) or usb drive (portability). You can even link to *cough* wow installed on ntfs windows partition (worked but I experience long pauses in loading/exiting).

So in conclusion; say you borked your wine install tweaking the registry or installing DX/IE9 something another. Rename or delete the prefix directory, run wine to recreate clean prefix, relink Wow to drive_c and done.

[cwwilson721]

To tell the truth, that is EXACTLY what I do (symlink to the WoW folder), but I DO create different WINEPREFIX folders.

The reason why is that it is WAY too easy using the method described above to 'accidently' install a nefarious program into your main 'wine' install. Using different WINEPREFIX installs eliminates that very common issue, and thus, removes the issue of 'no news reader'.

But, everybody is different, and every install is different. So do as you wish.

THAT is the REAL power of using Linux. There is no 'real' right way, nor is there a true 'wrong way'. There is only 'your way'.

Read up, learn, and apply.

Well, maybe that is the 'right way'

[dokhidamo]

Recently moved to Ubuntu, trying to get WoW to work.
Good news, it does.
Bad news, it's missing 99% of models. Players show only helm and shoulders (and the arrow of my hunter's crossbow). Login is also bugged (see attachment). Using an ATI card with M2Shading already adjusted. Did the registry edit, no change, actually may have made it laggier.

Edit: Also crashes a few minutes into play. When it does that, it causes the entire system to lock up shortly afterward.

Pic of in-game: http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n...Screenshot.png

[thepiratefish]

Sorry I'm being such a pain in the *** on this forum with the WoW question, but I understand very little about the language of linux and I think I almost have my problem solved.

I started running WoW in a window and I added the line

SET GxApi "OpenGL"

in the spot where I think it goes and it solved my total blackout problem

Now, if I log in on either of my top lvl characters (which happen to be in Orgrimar) the program immediately experiences an error and has to close. If I enter the world on some of my lower level characters that are just out in the open, they don't experience this problem right away. I was on a level 8 rogue and I was able to run around kill things for about 15 minutes before I got the same error message.

[t.rei]

It would probably be usefull to tell us the error message.

[thepiratefish]

You raise an excellent point

Do you want a screen shot of the error message box that pops up?