So a while back you may remember that I posted about switching to Ubuntu, and a second post later about running Warcraft under Linux. Up until yesterday I was running WoW using Cedega 6, and its been working “good enough”. Occasionally I’ve had problems with WoW not launching, crashing on launch, or launching wrong (no graphics, no sound, or extremely slow). Even with these problems, it hasn’t been a big deal. Generally closing WoW and re-launching it fixed the problem — sometimes restarting X also helped.
Recently Wine 0.9.58 was released. I figured it was about time to try to get World Of Warcraft running under Wine. Of course the repo for Ubuntu wasn’t up to 58 yet, so I used 57. (NOTE: As of this writing 58 is available for Ubuntu — I just haven’t tried it yet) I sym linked in the WoW folder from Cedega to Wine and went to town. Works great! There is a note about a registry tweak that is supposed to make the game run faster — but I didn’t notice any difference. The one KEY item to do, is to force WoW to launch with OpenGL. I created a launch icon on my desktop that executes the following (in a command window, cause I like to see the debugery): env WINEPREFIX=”/home/USERNAME/.wine” wine “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Wow.exe” -opengl. Without OpenGL I got 14 FPS outside of IF. With OpenGL I was getting almost 30. Oh, I also configured wine to use Windows 2003.
As a note of comparison, I think wine actually runs WoW better than Cedega. First off the speed is a little better. Second off the graphics would occasionally act funny (like my running but showing no animation) with Cedega, but not in wine. Of course, I haven’t used it for all that long yet — but so far, so good. Also, no crashes. I’d recommend it over Cedega… Why? Wine is free!