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I was bored the other and figured I’d see how my friends on World of Warcraft were doing. I usually get daily updates through our guild forum, which is the mother of all spammers and father of all off-topic threads, but It had been a while since I played with them and it would be nice time spent idling in Undercity and talking nonsense with the guild. To take my time killing initativ even further I decided not to reboot to Windows, but have World of Warcraft run on Mandriva.

Prerequisities

In order to run World of Warcraft, you need ensure your configuration has the proper functions enabled. Check this by running:

glxinfo | grep rendering

Your output should look like this:

[lars@localhost ~]$ glxinfo | grep rendering

direct rendering: Yes

You also need to install Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), “Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix”. Do this either by running rpmdrake or using urpmi in the terminal:

urpmi wine

This will install Wine and a couple of required libraries. Before continuing, you need to run winecfg atleast once in order for it to set up your hard drives and create the .wine folder. Do so by running:

winecfg

in a terminal window.

Installing World of Warcraft

If you already have World of Warcraft installed from a previous or multi boot Windows installation, you can skip this step, unless you want a separate version of the game for Linux.

There’s a few different ways of doing this. I’ll describe one where you copy the contents of your CD set to hard drive beforehand.

Create a directory for your installation data and copy all of the files from the first CD. For the remaining 4, you just need the Installer Tome #.mpq files. Start the installation by browsing to your newly created directory in a terminal and run:

cd your/wow/cd/set/directory

wine "Installer.exe"

Note you might get a few graphical glitches during the installation, and it might appear to freeze for five minutes or so. Just have patience and see it through.

Installing World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Redo the steps above for the expansion CD set, but copy the contents to a different directory.

cd your/tbc/cd/set/directory

wine "Installer.exe"

Configuration

If you’re installing this on the Asus M50Sa, your need for configuration shouldn’t differ much from mine, but for the sake of keeping it slightly more general, I’ll mention some extras.

Should you be really lucky, you might already be able to run World of Warcraft. Try it by either double clicking the desktop icon, if you’ve gone by the installation, or run:

wine "Drive letter:\path\to\your\World of Warcraft\Executable\"

in a terminal window. By default, its path would be the same as in Windows: C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Wow.exe.

However, most people get lesser performance by running it using D3D, as you would out of the box like this, if being able to run it at all. On my notebook things were looking good until it crashed after loading the in-game contents. The solution is to run World of Warcraft in OpenGL mode.

Locate your Config.wtf. The default location, if you installed from scratch, is /home/your-username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf. Note that you’ll be editing the same file as you would use in Windows if you share the installation between the two operating systems. Making a backup so you don’t ruin the previous configuration is advised. Add the following line to Config.wtf:

SET gxApi "opengl"

If graphical glitches occur or the game still crashes, add or edit these lines as well:

SET ffxDeath "0"

SET ffxGlow "0"

If you experience a black login screen, missing models and graphics when now running the game, as I did, try disabling M2Shaders like so:

SET  M2UseShaders "0"

With these changes to Config.wtf, I was able to run the game smoothly. The only problem was a completely white minimap. I haven’t figured out what the cause of this is yet. I’ve also been unable to get any sound working. Been fiddling with the Sound options in winecfg, but to no avail. Also tried these settings in Config.wtf:

SET Sound_SoundOutputSystem "1"

SET Sound_SoundBufferSize "150"

If anyone has any hints or tips, please drop off a comment or message letting me know.

Update:

Seems I really do have sound, but I’m unable to share the mixer device between applications. This basically means I can’t listen to music while playing, or use Ventrilo or any other VoIP program. I’ll have to look into to this later on. And I also noticed that the minimap glitch only occurs when visiting A’dal‘s room in Shattrath and while being in Undercity.

Update #2:

I’ve managed to get World of Warcraft (read: Wine) to run with PulseAudio and thus able to have sounds both in the game and from any other program using PA, at the same time. It took some configuration, which I’m too tired to explain at the moment, but I’ll post an article explaining the method later in the coming week.

The minimap bug I mentioned is also a bit more invasive than I thought. The minimap gets colored completely white in all major cities, as well as inside caves and such. However, veins, quest items and its likings are displayed. In addition to this, from time to time, items, as you loot them, displays a wrong icon and I’ve also seen a couple of buffs have the same glitch. Nothing that can’t be ignored, but just mentioning it so you won’t get surprised.