Thursday, September 11, 2008

Linux Users Do It With Wine

(Warning: Techie-ish Post mostly for the benefit of people who may reach this via Google. Read at your own risk!)

So the Wrath of the Lich King Beta installer worked fine on Wine at the beginning-- no issues, nice smooth graphics on the pretty Installer screen... and then I had to read the EULA (where "read" is defined as "hit Page Down twenty times within a span of two seconds") and hit "I Agree". Pretty straightforward right?

Well no, because the Installer decided to keep the "I Agree" button grayed out and not let me click it. Bugger.

A quick Google search showed that this was indeed a Wine bug and could be fixed by one of two options; either updating Wine (which in all honesty is itself a bit of a chore simply because I am using an older version of my distro) or doing something crazy and hacky.

Obviously I chose the latter.

This is what I did:

1.) Installed "IEs4Linux", which sticks a Wine-version of Internet Explorer on your computer. (Yes I installed IE. This is the type of sacrifice I make for this game.)

2.) An attempt to run the installer via IEs4Linux's Wine told me I needed to have Burning Crusade installed. So, I went over to my Burning Crusade folder, opened the terminal inside the folder, and typed the following:

pikestaff@pintsize:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine wow.exe

Which created the registry files for the original WoW/BC, then I hopped over to the WotLK folder and...

pikestaff@pintsize:~/Desktop/WotLK-Beta-3.0.1-enUS$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine Installer.exe

And I was able to start up the installer, click the "I Agree" button, and...



All set!

Of course, now comes the dreaded patch downloads, and my computer tends to download patches at a horrifically slow rate, so I'm off to bed while it does that. My characters haven't copied over yet anyway (I am copying both Tawyn, my level 70 Alliance hunter, and Lunapike, my level 68 Horde hunter, to Northrend, the PvE beta server. When I'm all set up you fellow beta-people can say hello!) so, I'm okay with waiting.

I will continue to bring you updates of a Linuxy nature and a huntery nature as they come. I will also continue to bring non-Beta news to those of you who would like to keep WotLK a surprise-- in all honesty I don't plan on spending as much time in Beta as a lot of other people are cause I'd sorta like to be mostly surprised too. I just gotta get in on the new hunteryness for a bit. Anyways, I think I might mark my Beta posts with [WotLK] or [Beta] or something in the title as a spoiler alert.

I figure, lotsa bloggers are showing you the nuts and bolts of Beta, I will give you vintage Pike thoughts on Beta =3

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like you and I got our beta invites at the same time! Looking forward to posts about the beta; if ever you see a night elf hunter named Sadejester following you around Shattrath (or wherever) with his mouth dragging the ground and making all kinds of fanboy-y noises, don't worry.

It's just a fan. :)

Rilgon Arcsinh said...

Holy crap o_O;

Man am I ever glad that I only ever use my *nix install for development and learning Apache.

Anonymous said...

Very nice article! Please keep us up to date on how everything runs/looks in Linux.

Prophessor said...

Lucky you getta go in Beta

Anonymous said...

I just want to say that I used this to install the PTR version of 3.x on my Linux box. Thanks a ton for the instructions. For those who care, these instructions work for the PTR download as well, just change the Installer.exe on the last command to Blizzard\ Updater.exe and it will go fine. Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

When I first started running WOW on my Ubuntu machine I followed your guide and it worked like a charm. Naturally I came back here when the installation of WoTLK didn't work, due to the "I Agree" button never becoming clickable.

This guide was very good, however I decided in the end to follow the other route, the alternative you mentioned but didn't do. I upgraded WINE. Because of this article I went and took a look at what version I had and I actually had a really outdated one, 0.9 something. I upgraded to the latest one I could get from an official Ubuntu repository, and decided on the latest beta (1.18) rather than the latest stable release (1.01).

The installation worked like a charm after that, so now I am playing my heart out. :)

I have to say though that I did not install from the DVD in the WoTLK box. Those never worked for me so I had instead downloaded the general installer from Blizzard and installed by selecting the WoTLK client in the drop box when the installer starts.

WoW Gold Guide said...

good post