Installing WoW under Wine

Running Wow on stock wine in Ubuntu worked just fine without extra work.

Wow on Fedora 17 wine didn't work with my normal method, so I tried getting it to work in virtual box or Xen. But that didn't pan out for me.

Now the latest Wow has the Pandaria patch. I haven't been able to upgrade any of the Ubuntu Wow clients to Pandaria. But I was able to install a fresh pandaria client on Fedora 17. Unfortunately, Pandaria Wow on Fedora 17 has lots of video glitches that obscure the screen and make other player characters show as black. I tried making the suggested video settings:

If you find see a lot of black dots and lines all over the screen, go to Options -> Graphics and set:

Liquid Detail: Fair (or lower)
Sunshafts: Disabled
SSAO_Label: Disabled

Alternatively, you can do regedit and add the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D\AlwaysOffscreen set to "enabled"

Ref:
http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30403

But those changes did not correct the display glitches.

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.