Disclaimer: this was posted 21-11-2014, but it was written around 07-09-2014.
The current state of my World of Warcraft installation via Wine is that I can start WoW, but I can't run the installer, and I'm also not able to run the updater. I'm not using anything in Wine at the moment, so I can remove wine and reinstall. I haven't done this since before I reinstalled Ubuntu, I copied my ~/.wine from the previous installation, so I'm pretty sure it will have some benefits to reinstall at this point.
Initially I had the Battle.Net installer running fine, but the WoW installer crashed very soon after starting. I found this post that instructed to upgrade your version of wine to 1.7. Since I had 1.6.2 installed (I just installed with sudo apt-get install wine
), I fully uninstalled wine:
sudo apt-get remove wine
sudo apt-get autoremove
rm -rf ~/.wine
And tried installing wine 1.7.4 from a PPA repo:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine1.7
winecfg
and mount /media/ExtraDrive/WoW as D:winefile
and go to d: and double click WoW installerStarting the game works, even though I am playing while the download progress in Battle.net indicates "playable" and I'm not waiting for "optimal". I can change settings to 1920x1080 (normal graphical settings). Setting the preferred monitor doesn't seem to do anything, but I can set it to "windowed" and then maximize. This seems to work pretty well. I've logged in to the game, ctrl+r reveals ca 21 fps (running as DirectX).
I tried to activate OpenGL rendering by editing the Config.wtf in my installation directory /media/ExtraDrive/WoW/World of Warcraft/WTF. I changed the value [gxAPI "D3D9"] to [gxAPI "OpenGL"]. After this WoW would start up, but gets stuck on "connecting". I waited and tried to restart several times to no effect. When reverting the setting to [gxAPI "D3D9"] in the Config.wtf, I can again login normally. More information on this issue can be found in this thread.
I have played succesfully for a week, but now battle.net doesn't start anymore (probably because of wine updates)
wine Battle.net.exe
, resulting in a black screen, no errorswine World of warcraft launcher.exe
, this starts battle.net, shows an update and lets me scan for games, than again the black screenwine Wow-64.exe
, I get the WoW login screen, but did not try to log inwine Wow-64.exe
still works, but the WoW client is outdated, so won't log in.wine World of warcraft launcher.exe
updates the battle.net client, but still black screenI reinstalled my video driver (I have an Intel IGP), but it had no effect. It has been suggested that this might be an IGP + Ubuntu specific issue. Fortunately, webupd8 offers a workaround. It is possible to switch to software rendering, but only for Battle.net. After updating the game client run WoW with hardware rendering:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 wine /media/ExtraDrive/WoW/Battle.net/Battle.net\ Launcher.exe
wine /media/ExtraDrive/WoW//World\ of\ Warcraft/Wow-64.exe
This works!
This workaround still seems to work and I used it to upgrade to WoW 6.0.3:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 wine /media/ExtraDrive/WoW/Battle.net/Battle.net\ Launcher.exe
But I do notice that Ubuntu is now mounting ExtraDrive as /media/ExtraDrive_ so I have to run
sudo umount /media/ExtraDrive_
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/ExtraDrive
Otherwise Battle.net wouldn't be able to find WoW without repairing/scanning. However, this is mounting issue is out of scope for running WoW on Ubuntu.
Logging in and playing still works with:
wine /media/ExtraDrive/WoW//World\ of\ Warcraft/Wow-64.exe
This is the current state.