Installing WoW under Wine

The wine that comes with Fedora 17 is 1.5, but I could not get WoW to run with that Wine. Instead, I removed wine, enabled the Fedora 16 repo, and then installed an older wine.

yum install wine-1.3.29-1.fc16.x86_64

I've had good luck with wine 1.4 under ubuntu. I've seen that playonlinux and crossover use wine 1.2. So I'm guessing that wine 1.3 will work.

References

• http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_functionality_on_Wine
• http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4496521038
• http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4362519923

After making sure the hardware requirements are satisfied, the recipe looks like this:

• winetricks
  • install game
  • wowtrial

If the desktop icon is broken, start the game with:

./local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Wow.exe

The installer starts, but hangs when displaying "Downloading updated tools"

Check to see if the patch in Temp is completely downloaded:

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ ls -l
total 23112
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday  6399096 May 23 18:04 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-downloader.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday 12866240 May 23 18:11 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe.part
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday  4392070 May 23 18:34 wow-patch.mpq

That patch has a .part extension, so it is not ready to run yet. But 12MB is about the right size.

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ ls -l
total 23100
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday  6399096 May 23 18:41 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-downloader.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rday rday 12853680 May 23 18:46 wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rday rday  4392070 May 23 18:41 wow-patch.mpq

Those files are ready to go. Cancel the installer and go to the WorldofWarcraft Temp directory Manually run the wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe

rday@potato:~/.local/share/wineprefixes/wowtrial/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Temp$ wine ./wow-4.2.1.2736-enUS-tools-patch.exe 

Wait for the Installer/Updater to download the rest of the game.