07 Sep 2014

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

  • Run winecfg and mount /media/ExtraDrive/WoW as D:
  • Run winefile and go to d: and double click WoW installer
  • Battle.net installer shows. Change install location to d:\battlenet
  • WoW installer shows. Change install location to d:\World of Warcraft
  • Installer starts, and passes first couple of minutes
  • Managed to use settings to throttle my download speed, but the battle.net dashboard is not really responsive. Have to click and drag down a bit.

Starting 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.

Update 4-10

I have played succesfully for a week, but now battle.net doesn't start anymore (probably because of wine updates)

  • Ran wine Battle.net.exe, resulting in a black screen, no errors
  • Ran wine World of warcraft launcher.exe, this starts battle.net, shows an update and lets me scan for games, than again the black screen
  • Ran wine Wow-64.exe, I get the WoW login screen, but did not try to log in

Update 26-10

  • Started battle.net again (through Unity) and get the login screen. After that the black screen again.
  • wine 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 screen

I 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!

Update 20-11

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.