Tyler McManus .com

So I’m sure that for many of us dual-booting converts stepping into the Linux world, one of the most common obstacles keeping us handcuffed to Windows is World of Warcraft. Well not anymore for me, thank you very much.

I went through many tutorials on how to configure WoW for Ubuntu, but I found the below link to be by far the most helpful AND up-to-date:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft

In truth, I did part of this the easy way. Once I had installed wine and configured it, instead of installing each of the disks (WoW + Burning Crusade) from Ubuntu, I just dragged the 10GB installation folder from the Vista side to Wine’s pseudo C drive \ Program Files directory, which by default is located here:

/home/<yourusername>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/

So that’s much less hassle, and I highly recommend it if at all possible. The other excellent bonus of this method is that I didn’t have to reinstall or mess with any of my addons, of which I have several.

So once all the files were copied over, I followed the instructions from the link above and added this to my Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/config.wtf file:

SET gxApi "opengl"

SET ffxDeath "0"

SET ffxGlow "0"

SET SoundOutputSystem "1"

SET SoundBufferSize "150"

And if you want to run WoW in windowed mode, add this as well:

SET gxWindow "1"

I also created the shortcut indicated, and added that to my panel, complete with WoW SVG icon. Nice touch by the editors of ubuntu.com. So now I’m finally up and running with WoW in Ubuntu. One less thing tying me to Windows.

Note: Technically, I had tried this all once before, and it was kind of working, but it was with a lower end graphics card, and though I could log into the game, once in Azeroth, the ground was black everywhere I went, and lighting was all funky whenever I went in doors. Oh, and the text looked like Sanskrit. I probably should have taken a screenshot. So if you call that “working”, then this is old hat. Otherwise, its finally up. May my blades never dull.

So on Black Friday, I picked up a new graphics cards since my previous didn’t fit in my new machine. The one I got was the NVidia GeForce 6200 LE ($50 with a $50 mail-in rebate = free graphics card. sweet). I went with this one as opposed to an ATI card since the majority of information I found online indicates that overall Linux support for NVidia is good, while support for ATI kind of sux0rz. To be fair, as I understand it, the reason for the lack of consistent ATI support is on the part of the ATI development team, not on the Linux community side (newbie disclaimer). So anyway, I installed the card and booted straight into Ubuntu (I’ll install the Vista drivers later. Maybe). Though instead of the GUI, I boot into the command line telling me very sexily:

(EE) no devices detected.
fatal server error:
no screens found

which of course is awesome like command-line sudoku. And even though I realize its telling me ‘No screens found’ because it can’t find the device listed in my xorg.conf file, I still find it humorous that its giving me this error message on one of the screens it can’t find lol. Well I tried a few things, but in the end, the below steps are what worked for me.

1. Reconfigure x (the desktop environment), like this:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

2. Once thats completed, restart x:

$ startx

3. Once in, head to synaptic to install the correct drivers: Applications / ‘Add/Remove’.

4. Search for ‘drivers’ and check the box for ‘Restricted Drivers Manager’. Apply Changes.

5. Once installed, go there: System / Administration / Restricted Drivers Manager.

6. Check the box next to the NVidia drivers it found to enable them. You will be prompted to log out or reboot (this was the first time I’ve ever been prompted to reboot in linux).

Once you log out or reboot you should be good.

7. You may want to adjust your screen resolution: System / Preferences / Screen Resolution.

8. You may also want to verify that openGL is installed. For me, this is a necessary component for both Compiz and World of Warcraft via Wine.

$ glxinfo | grep rendering

If openGL is installed (which it should be if everything else ran correctly), it will say:

direct rendering: Yes

or maybe direct rendering: woohoo! on some machines (jk). Good luck.