A while ago I started thinking about running World of Warcraft on Linux, and someone even left me a note about a petition for a Linux-native client a month or two ago too. I'd love to see a native client for WoW in Linux, but that's not here today. So I turned to Wine for the first time in years.

I tried Wine way back when I first installed Debian Linux in 1998. Things were different then. I'd wanted to try out Linux before then but I was help up by lack of support for exotic things like IDE hard drives. Yes, it was a different time. I was tied to a lot more closed-source Windows apps, like the brilliant IRC client mIRC. So my experience with Wine was trying to get mIRC running without really understanding Winsock, sockets, or any of that stuff. The program would start but never connected. Let's just say I was left wanting.

While I've been off doing my own thing, the Wine team has been hard at work and they've done some amazing things. Amazing things like working without an installed copy of MS Windows on your machine, supporting some DirectX stuff and generally taking a lot of the pain out of running Windows applications on Linux. My new desktop is a single-boot machine so far. I might try out MS Windows Vista some day, but I'm not in any hurry.

So the other day I started thinking about how fast my AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer is compared to my year-old Compaq R3000z laptop that I've been running WoW on. I read about some very positive experiences with WoW on Wine under other Linux distros.

I saw that some of the complaints about working with WoW on Suse were about Blizzard's installer. No sweat, I didn't plan to run the installer anyhow. Apparently if you do there's something you need to do manually when you switch discs in order to avoid Suse hooking the disc change event. Why don't I need the installer? Because Blizzard (very intelligently in my opinion) doesn't put anything essential in the registry. So I was able to just copy my existing installed copy of WoW off my laptop on to my Suse box using a Samba shared folder. The copy was a lot faster than I expected, I don't think it was even two hours and it went over WiFi.

After I copied the files over I tried it out. Wine comes with Suse so I just went to the directory in a console and typed something like wine Launcher.exe. It gave me an error about trying to do something with ActiveX. This page from the Gentoo wiki points to the solution, an ActiveX control developed by Adam Lock. Just download the installer for the Mozilla ActiveX plugin (the Windows version) and run it in Wine. I did this and was able to see the WoW Launcher on my next try. It still gave some error message and doesn't give the news, but all I care is that big "Play" button works.

After the lancher I was able to connect to the server and log in just like normal. Once in Stormwind though, things were less than perfect. I was impressed at how much did work, but it still wasn't playable. Around every character I saw a black area. Sometimes it's a box, sometimes it seems more like a bubble. My guess is that it's some kind of shader applied to a bounding area around players & NPCs. Another issue was a total lack of sound. I'm going to leave sound for last since I had a different problem there. Finally, the biggest problem was that I can't interact with any NPCs. This includes innkeepers. auctioneers and the mailbox. This makes the game unusable so far. I could do /target to select the person but still no interaction. I messed with all kinds of video settings but nothing made a difference.

While messing around I did a few things that may have saved me trouble later, one that seems like it might matter was the repair program in the WoW folder. I ran wine Repair.exe and the tool checked all the files in my installation and downloaded some new files. I think maybe I had some stuff damaged before I copied it. The other useful thing I did was switch to OpenGL rendering (instead of DirectX) in WoW. There's a command line option for each, wine WoW.exe -d3d to use D3D and WoW.exe -opengl for OpenGL. The default is set in WTF/Default.wtf (in your WoW application folder). I added these three lines to my Default.WTF based on what the Gentoo wiki said.

The thing that finally fixed almost all of my problems was upgrading to the latest version of Wine (0.9.25 for me). I didn't have the dependencies necessary to build from source so I just grabbed the i586 build (which would be 32-bit) and it worked fine. Suse 10.1 came with 0.9.12 and didn't have anything newer available in Yast. This is becoming a recurring trend, sometimes I mess around too long before upgrading to the latest version of a program. Maybe if the Suse servers were a little quicker to update, but then that leads to my next problem. After upgrading Wine, I still had no sound. I ran winecfg as I saw recommended for a few different Wine sound problems. The dialog in winecfg looked kind of like this (click for bigger):

But Alsa and OSS couldn't be selected properly and the list included another item - Jack - which I wasn't familiar with. The short version of this story is that I updated Suse using the automatic updater earlier the same day and that's how I got Jack. Jack looks like a useful application from the description but I wasn't going to play with it right away. I messed around with all kinds of things while I was trying to fix the sound in WoW before I realized that sound wasn't working at all on my system. As soon as I realized that I just uninstalled Jack and set applications back to using Alsa. I was able to select Alsa in winecfg and after that sound worked in WoW perfectly. Oh, in wincfg I also set my default Windows Version to XP on the Applications tab.

So with my onboard GeForce 6150 (using 128MB of system RAM) the graphics are pretty amazing to me. It might not impress other people as much, but it beats the hell out of the rendering on my laptop (with a GeForce 4 To Go) and I thought that looked okay.