World of Warcraft functionality on Wine

Wine is a free software application which aims to allow Unix-like operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows. It is not officially supported for World of Warcraft and users have sometimes run afoul of Blizzard Entertainment policies with it.

Introduction
This article primarily talks about setting up Wine for running the MS Windows version of World of Warcraft. Wine also runs on Macintosh computers with x86 CPUs under Mac OS X, but since Blizzard makes a Mac OS X native World of Warcraft client, running it under Wine is unnecessary and even silly.

World of Warcraft had a client for Linux while it was in the beta phase of development, but it was later dropped and never officially released. Currently, WoW is run on Linux by use of Windows. Given that the World of Warcraft client is no longer officially developed to work in Linux, the installation of it on Linux is a somewhat more involved process than on Windows, which it is streamlined to install more easily on. However, with some careful research, and a bit of patience, it's very possible to do so.

Alternatively a streamlined process of installation and windows installation conversion is available via Play On Linux.

Installation
This guide will only cover the Wine compatibility layer. It is however fully compatible with Crossover.

Before you begin the installation, you should run the following simple command, which will check whether your video card driver has DRI enabled, which allows WoW to run much faster (you may need to install package mesa-utils): glxinfo | grep rendering

Which should return a line similar to this:

direct rendering: Yes

If this line says "No", it means that the graphics data will be handled in software rather than directly by the graphics hardware, thus significantly reducing speed at which WoW will run. Thankfully if you are using relatively recent hardware, enabling DRI is usually just a configuration issue.

For more information about enabling DRI, refer to the information from your distribution's support guides on graphic card driver installation. For extended personal help, forums and chatrooms are usually a good bet. Just tell them what the Make and Model of your graphic card is and they will be able to point you in the right direction. As always, remember that search engines are your friend.

Distribution-specific methods
Different GNU/Linux distributions use different methods of installing software, which oftentimes makes it hard to make easy installation options available for all distributions, especially for large and complex projects like Wine. Luckily a lot of energy has been put into making the distribution native installation methods available for a large variety of popular distributions. Please see http://www.winehq.org/site/download and follow the installation directions for your particular distribution.

Compiling Wine
If you were unable to install Wine with a method found on that site, or if you are an experienced user wanting more control over the installation, then you may want to look into compiling Wine from source code. See the WineHQ wiki for information: http://wiki.winehq.org/Recommended_Packages

Installing WoW
This section explains four different methods of installing WoW. If the first method doesn't work for you, or you prefer a different approach, then simply skip to the next method and so on.

Method 1. Install from CDs
If you're lucky you can properly run the installation from the cds, which require that you are able to change between them while the installation runs.

Simply put disc 1 in the CD or DVD drive, and do the following (replace /media/cdrom0 with wherever you mount your cds): wine /media/WoWDisc1/Installer.exe

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 the text is too small, and it annoys you: Please install msttcorefonts per instruction of your distribution.

If everything works like it should, then the installation will run for a while and then ask for disc 2, you change CDs and it should continue until it asks for the next one and so forth, if it doesn't work, however, you will continue to receive the "Please insert Disc 2" Warning repeatedly. An easy way is to unmount Disk 1 then insert disk 2, it will take a few seconds for it to load and mount, but it will load. Follow these for the rest of the disks and it should be ready to go. If it still doesn't work, skip to method two.

If you have problems ejecting CDs in wine try: Start winecfg, then select Drives, auto detect drives The you'll probably get a Drive Letter like L: /media/WoWDisc1/ Now you can use wine eject L: Then press the eject button on your CD/DVD drive. For the next CD you'll have to run wincfg again and substitute /media/WoWDisc1/ to ... WoWDisc2 and so on. So the wine eject will work without a Problem.

No Installer.exe?
This may primarily be a Fuse problem, but may appear on other systems not using Fuse as well. Run the following command from a terminal:

sudo mount -o remount,unhide /dev/cdrom

Note that your CD drive may not be /dev/cdrom! Check by running the command  without arguments and look for a reasonable device (cd#, sr#, etc...)

Problems mounting the DVD (collectors edition for [Vanilla] and [TBC] and standard for [WotLK])
The issues might be related to either a defective (auto-)mount for the Hybrid Disks used (ISO 9660 and HFS+) or defective (auto-)mount without UDF support. For the Hybrid disks please refer to the specific documentation available on the internet. However the most likely cause is the missing UDF support when mounting the disc. In case it is mounted please unmount it

umount /dev/drivename (e.g. cdrom)

then use the following line to mount it again with UDF support:

mount -t udf -o ro,unhide,uid=1000 /dev/drivename /mountpoint (e.g. /mnt)

Method 2. Copy CDs to HD
Create a new folder on your computer. Copy all of the files from the first CD and all but the Installer.exe file from the rest to this directory on your hard drive (overwrite when prompted). Copying the Installer.exe from the other CD's will cause the install to fail with Unrecognized key "options". (AttributeParser::Parse)

Then run: cd // wine Installer.exe

Replace  with the right path to the directory where you copied all the files. You should now have the installation running, but make sure the CD media is out of the drive or it will check there and you'll be stuck in it again.

Method 3. Copy or run from Win
You can also just install WoW in Windows and then copy the entire World of Warcraft folder over from your Windows installation.

Or if you've already got WoW installed on your Windows partition, you can just use Wine to launch WoW directly from this installation. There is an added benefit to doing this, if you actively multiboot between Linux and Windows, because you will only need to have one copy of WoW on your hard drive for it to run in both environments. Please keep in mind that you must have both read and write access to your Windows partition for this to work, and only the most recently released GNU/Linux distributions, are currently providing write access to NTFS (Windows XP) partitions out of the box. If you do not have write access to your NTFS partition, you will need to consult with your distributions documentation for directions on enabling the NTFS-3G driver, which adds this feature.

Note: Using this method results in there being no entries for WoW in Wine's registry, but this does not cause any issues at all with running WoW.

Note 2 : Some computers might experience low FPS, while trying to run WoW in opengl mode. In that case, removing Config.wtf file ( it is localised in WTF folder ) , running WoW to generate that file again , and then making changes ( to opengl mode ) might help. Make sure, to give read/write access to WTF folder ( otherwise WoW will crash ). Add this line to your Config.wtf file using your favorite text editor:

SET gxAPI "OpenGL"

Note 3 : Intel 945 integrated video chipset does not take kindly to OpenGL. If your game crashes frequently, try not using OpenGL.

In a system with Fuse, such as Ubuntu or Fedora, a default install of wine will run WoW from a mounted drive that has World of Warcraft installed just by adding the -opengl flag at the end: wine "/media/windowsdrive/WorldofWarcraft/Wow.exe" -opengl where "windowsdrive" is the name of the drive in /media that you have mounted. Replace the path name with your install! You could have installed it in Program Files or a different folder. Something to note; if you run WoW in Windows after running it in linux, you will have to change a few video settings back, like the shadow quality. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountingWindowsPartitions for instructions on getting your Windows drive to mount automatically on startup using fstab.

Method 4. Download client
Or if you have lost a CD, do not have access to a cd drive or simply would not want to bother with patching and messing with the CD's, you can download the trial version, which is in fact the full game almost fully patched, from the blizzard torrentlike downloader. They work very nicely with wine. You may be asked to log in with your WoW account.

All European WoW clients in all languages:
 * WoW-Europe.com

US Version:
 * Worldofwarcraft.com
 * WoW Vanilla client
 * Burning Crusade client

Alternatively you can simply log into your account at your regional WoW community site, and download the full client from the Battle.net Dashboard

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.


 * 1) The easiest way to open these ports is to use the open-source firewall program 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).
 * 2) Next, 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

Method 5. In case of having an intel graphics
Follow the steps from this blog: I google it so much and this page get me to the solution.
 * [ http://translate.google.com.br/translate?hl=pt-BR&langpair=pt|en&u=http://www.ladolinuxdaforca.com.br/linux/jogos/instalando-world-of-warcraft-linux-intel&prev=/translate_s%3Fhl%3Dpt-BR%26q%3Dwww.ladolinuxdaforca.com.br/linux/jogos/instalando-world-of-warcraft-linux-intel%26sl%3Den%26tl%3Dpt]

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, you should do this as it will enable the WoW Launcher to do 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"

Be certain to add  to the command if you didn't add the gxApi line as described in the Config.wtf section above.

Desktop menu icon
To make an icon for the desktop menu in GNOME or KDE:


 * Download the application icon to some directory.
 * Open the menu editor by right-clicking the menu button on the GNOME/KDE panel, and create a new application entry. Choose the newly downloaded icon as the application icon. In the "Command line" field, you will need to write:

wine LAUNCHER

where LAUNCHER is the full path to the application .exe file, either Launcher.exe or WoW.exe (see above).

In Xfce, there currently is no menu editor. You can instead create a text file in  named , and paste this:

&#91;Desktop Entry&#93; Name=World of Warcraft Exec=wine LAUNCHER Icon=Wow-icon-scalable.svg Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Application;Game; StartupNotify=false

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

Troubleshooting
See Wine troubleshooting.

Miscellaneous

 * For other relevant various information and tips please see Wine miscellaneous info.
 * For troubleshooting tips (including common problems and their workarounds), see Wine troubleshooting.
 * For Linux Native Ventrilo check out http://www.mangler.org.