Missing Link

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) on my Ubuntu Linux machine for quite a while now, and I have found it to be every bit as playable as it was on a Windows machine. Because of my successes with it (after learning some tricks to bring about that success) I decided I would post a short post detailing how I went about getting WoW to work.

First, let me detail the hardware I’m running – that MAY be a key to my success. I’m running an old nForce 2 based motherboard supporting an Athlon Xp 2800+ CPU and a gig of PC3200 ram, a Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard and a GeForce 7300 GT video card with 512mb of VRAM. The video card is a newer addition, prior to it I ran a Radeon 9800 Pro – I was running that card when I tried WoW on Edgy. After upgrading to the GeForce the game was playable, but I also had just installed Feisty.

Assuming you have Ubuntu installed already, an exercise I leave to you, the first thing I did was download Envy. Envy is a nice little script that will fetch the latest video drivers for your particular model of video card (nvidia or ati). I’ve used it several times with great results each time. Of course, your mileage may vary so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work for you. Once I had the driver installed I rebooted, I then checked to make sure the driver was working by issuing the following command:

glxinfo | grep rendering

which resulted in this:

Direct Rendering: Yes

if it doesn’t say YES there, then something is wrong and you need to troubleshoot that.

Since mine said yes, I proceeded with the install. First you have to install WINE, which is a compatability layer that allows SOME windows applications to run natively under Linux. WoW happens to be one of the programs that runs just fine using WINE. You can install WINE by going to add/remove programs and searching for it, checking it and installing it.

After it’s installed, it’s a good idea to run the command “winecfg” from the terminal, that will initialize WINE and get you on your way.

Once you’ve got WINE installed and working, it’s time to do the WoW install – this will require a good deal of disk space.

I created a temporary directory on my hard drive and copied the files from each cd to that directory. The exception to that being the Installer.exe – copy that only from Disk 1, not from any of the others (if you overwrite the one from disk one your install will fail – I found this out the hard way). Once you’ve copied all of the files over, simply run the installer with the command “wine path/to/Installer.exe”, making sure to change the path to where you copied the files to.

The installer should run, and install WoW on your machine. You’re not finished yet, though.

You now need to edit the config.WTF file in your WoW installation. Typically this is found in /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/

(if the file doesn’t exist, run the game and log in to a character, that will create it). Open the config.wtf file and add the following to the bottom:

SET gxApi "opengl"

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "150"

That will set the rendering to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, while Direct3D also works fine for me it does NOT for most people so it’s recommended that you use OpenGL in Linux. The other two lines set the sound system up to work better in Linux, you don’t technically HAVE to add them but they improved sound quality for me.

After that I tried playing but found it to still be kind of slow, I decided to check into it and see what, if anything, I could do to improve things. I found the following:

There’s a registry tweak that will greatly improve performance. To make the tweak you need to open the registry by running the command “regedit”.

Navigate to the following key in the registry window (using the + symbols to expand the trees until you find it): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine

Right click on the Wine folder and select NEW then KEY.

rename the newly created key “OpenGL” minus the quotes.

replace the “new value 1″ with “DisabledExtensions”, again minus the quotes.

Finally, double click anywhere on the newly created key, it’ll bring up a value box. In that box put “GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object”, minus quotes.

Save everything and close the registry editor. You should now see significantly better performance.

The last thing you need to do is to create a launcher for the game.

First, download a WoW icon suitable for this. From a terminal run:

wget http://kde-files.org/CONTENT/content-files/41569-wow-icon-scalable.svg

sudo mv 41569-wow-icon-scalable.svg /usr/share/icons/wow.svg

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/wow.desktop

In the window that opens now, you should put something like this:

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.svg
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Game;
StartupNotify=false

replacing <username> with that of your linux user. Save that and close, and you should have a nice new launcher.

You can optionally change the WoW.exe with Launcher.exe, which will run the WoW launcher prior to the actual game. Since this launcher sometimes (at least for me) has downloaded patches for me when it ran, I choose to do that.

Patches and everything else should run just fine by themselves just as if you were running windows.

If you want to install Burning Crusade, you can follow the same install process I listed above for WoW. You won’t need to do the tweaks again – just install and run and you’ll be fine.

That’s how I got WoW installed and running in Ubuntu. It may not work for you, it may work perfectly. I make no guarantees and take no responsibility if it doesn’t work. If you can’t get something to work you can leave a comment here – I’ll try to help as best I can.

I found a lot of the same material here on the Ubuntu Wiki, which is also a good place to look for help.

[tags] World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Ubuntu, WINE, Ubuntu, Linux Gaming, Gaming [/tags]