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08-28-12, 03:46 AM   #1
Ozzey
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Running Wow On Linux? - Help and Advice

Hey guys,
long Long time viewer of these forums, but never actually posted before,
and well if im honest, im bored of windows 7 / 8 and i fancy something new and more challenging,

So if you play wow on linux could you help me out by listing which Distro you used, and on a scale of 1-10 the difficulty you had getting it to run (i am a computer savey guy, i.e i can install a o.s build a comp, edit some lua, etc. .etc..) google just has too much info relating to non wow stuff, i wanted some feedback from you guys.
so heres an example of what im asking for (cheeky i know :P)

- Distro of linux
- Method of WoW install - Wine / Cedegar etc..
- FPS in WoW
- Difficulty of getting wow to work

I would really appreciate any help or advice people can give me, as there as so many different distro's and flavors i just don't know were to begin. Ubuntu looks a safe bet but it also looks Super Bloated, still not disregarded it tho.

Anyways Thanks for any responses,
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08-29-12, 09:49 AM   #2
Nuggs
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I've been playing WoW in GNU/Linux and Windows since 2005.

First things first, nobody is going to be able to tell you the difficulty for setting it up because that's relative to how well you can set up software for your distribution and your knowledge of Linux in general.

Second thing, configurations change between distributions and even between your distribution running the same distro as mine. I fine tune all my systems to get the best performance but I've also been using Linux and UNIX for sixteen years. Hardware support also plays a role in it.

Your FPS will likely suffer. Years ago in vanilla and TBC, I actually had a performance increase on Linux with WoW but in recent years, I haven't noticed this performance gain anymore(Possibly due to me having better hardware )

That's basically it. If you have more specific questions, feel free to ask them and I'll help you out as best as I can.

Another distro you can try besides Ubuntu(Can't stand Ubuntu) is Sabayon Linux. It's based off of Gentoo and has a really nice package manager and runs pretty snappy.

Though, I'm currently running fedora 16 I'm going to either be switching back to FreeBSD for a bit or switching from Fedora to either LFS or Gentoo.
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08-29-12, 10:28 AM   #3
Ozzey
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Originally Posted by Nuggs View Post
I've been playing WoW in GNU/Linux and Windows since 2005.

First things first, nobody is going to be able to tell you the difficulty for setting it up because that's relative to how well you can set up software for your distribution and your knowledge of Linux in general.

Second thing, configurations change between distributions and even between your distribution running the same distro as mine. I fine tune all my systems to get the best performance but I've also been using Linux and UNIX for sixteen years. Hardware support also plays a role in it.

Your FPS will likely suffer. Years ago in vanilla and TBC, I actually had a performance increase on Linux with WoW but in recent years, I haven't noticed this performance gain anymore(Possibly due to me having better hardware )

That's basically it. If you have more specific questions, feel free to ask them and I'll help you out as best as I can.

Another distro you can try besides Ubuntu(Can't stand Ubuntu) is Sabayon Linux. It's based off of Gentoo and has a really nice package manager and runs pretty snappy.

Though, I'm currently running fedora 16 I'm going to either be switching back to FreeBSD for a bit or switching from Fedora to either LFS or Gentoo.
firstly thank you so much, you have clarified a number of things for me.

in regards to knowing linux,
i know the very basics. like using VI nano and some simple terminal commands.
i.e mounting etc..

i did once manage to get a full gentoo install done with extensive reading of the guide.
this alone gave me some valuable knowledge after which i switched to ubutnu, which if im honest i did not like 1 bit.
it seems slow sluggish and overall not impressive. i had more fun installing gentoo. but i broke the system so many times over i just couldn't bring myself to another 2 day install.

i may give this sabayon a whirl.
thanks for your advice.

im presuming Wine is still the way to go for running WoW
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08-29-12, 10:37 AM   #4
Rilgamon
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I tested a few distros last weekend.
For my sister I setup an older computer with PCLinuxOS http://www.pclinuxos.com/?page_id=213
This setup ran out of the box quite well, just added wine-package, ts and stuff and it really was quite fast and stable.

On my own system I installed Ubuntu and I had quite some trouble to get it working. I even removed wine-package (1.4) to compile the current wine. Its roughly the same fps but I cant play it in fullscreen because after tabbing out one time I cant get back to it.

Tested some other setups and each distro has its problems ... with ubuntu I found most helpful articles for my problems.
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08-29-12, 10:46 AM   #5
Nuggs
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Originally Posted by Ozzey View Post
firstly thank you so much, you have clarified a number of things for me.

in regards to knowing linux,
i know the very basics. like using VI nano and some simple terminal commands.
i.e mounting etc..

i did once manage to get a full gentoo install done with extensive reading of the guide.
this alone gave me some valuable knowledge after which i switched to ubutnu, which if im honest i did not like 1 bit.
it seems slow sluggish and overall not impressive. i had more fun installing gentoo. but i broke the system so many times over i just couldn't bring myself to another 2 day install.

i may give this sabayon a whirl.
thanks for your advice.

im presuming Wine is still the way to go for running WoW
Not a problem. The more people running GNU/Linux, the better.

As for your question about Wine, I always compile it from the website but if you don't want to do that or might not know the proper configuration to run the compile, you can get pre-packaged one from the winehq website.

I generally check out how the unstable looks and use it but if I see a lot of problems with it for any games I play I'll check out one of the previous unstable releases before settling on their latest release.

The releases from your distribution will generally be older versions of Wine, unlike the official releases for stable/unstable from the winehq website.

Last edited by Nuggs : 08-29-12 at 10:47 AM. Reason: It's early, haven't slept, forgot to add a little more.
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08-30-12, 01:38 PM   #6
Ozzey
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Originally Posted by Nuggs View Post
Not a problem. The more people running GNU/Linux, the better.

As for your question about Wine, I always compile it from the website but if you don't want to do that or might not know the proper configuration to run the compile, you can get pre-packaged one from the winehq website.

I generally check out how the unstable looks and use it but if I see a lot of problems with it for any games I play I'll check out one of the previous unstable releases before settling on their latest release.

The releases from your distribution will generally be older versions of Wine, unlike the official releases for stable/unstable from the winehq website.
i know Gentoo is fully awesome, and can be easily reconfigured without breaking it.
and i like to mess around in CLI
so im thinking sabayon is a safe bet. for performance etc..
il attempt to compile wine from source. but first i got to install it..
had no luck tryin to boot the installer from USB. get a can't find root device error ... although i think that may be because its a FAT32 and theres files on there i believe bigger than the 2gb limit.
never the less il find a work around
thanks again for the advice.
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08-30-12, 01:39 PM   #7
Ozzey
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Thanks for the info Rilgamon :-)
much apreciated
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08-30-12, 07:07 PM   #8
Nuggs
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If you're talking about the WoW installer, copy it to your home directory and run from there?

If you're talking about wine, you could try PlayOnLinux. I've never used it but some of my newcomer friends use it because wine is a little complex for them(Like I said, newcomers, they just wanted to get up and running and went the easy route instead of learning. ) and they have nothing but good things to say about it.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
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08-31-12, 03:36 PM   #9
Ozzey
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Originally Posted by Nuggs View Post
If you're talking about the WoW installer, copy it to your home directory and run from there?

If you're talking about wine, you could try PlayOnLinux. I've never used it but some of my newcomer friends use it because wine is a little complex for them(Like I said, newcomers, they just wanted to get up and running and went the easy route instead of learning. ) and they have nothing but good things to say about it.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Thanks for the response,
i actually ment with the installer,
for some reason it would fail mounting /dev/sda or /dev/sdb1 etc.. when installing from usb..
solved the issue and now running Sabayon :-)
wow runs perfectly fine using the preinstalled Wine, although the launcher will not load. i have to wine /home/dir/wow/wow-64.exe but at this moment im too lazy to fix that. il do it tommorrow when i have more spare time :-)
leveling the sp time now and i must admit thank you for the recomendation.
this sabayon is SO FAST!
its stupidly quick, i mean yeah i have a prety awesome system but even so sabayon made windows 7 and 8 seem like windows 98 speed wise.

wow is running at a steady 299 fps. Vsync disabled - and thats at 1980x1080

all round i would Strongly recommend before people think omg its hard. it really isnt.
google can help if you get stuck but honestly my gf never even knew what linux was and she wont boot to windows as of 4 hours ago :P
so thanks again.
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08-29-13, 01:14 PM   #10
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I switched over to Xubuntu because gnome has turned into utter garbage, but to-date I have yet to get wow running satisfactorily on *nix-based systems. I have compiled wine from source, used pre-compiled packages and PlayOnLinux and consistently take a hit on performance. I've tried it with various configurations and following the suggestions of various online guides about tweaks to game settings and I still always take a severe hit to frame rate. Running with fairly high settings, I see steady 60fps (v-sync enabled) in Windows 8, but running absolutely lowest settings in every distro I have tried I always end up with 20fps or less. I have other games/apps that absolutely won't run on linux, so I am one of the many linux users with a windows partition for such occasions. I'd be interested to hear if someone has a sure-fire way to get it running good, but so far all of my attempts have been failures.
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08-29-13, 02:04 PM   #11
Rilgamon
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I've fully moved to (ubuntu-)linux now. I've added
Code:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu raring main
to update directly when a new release comes out.

The biggest impact brought me installing the right driver for my graphicscard. Some drivers are only provided as a binary-package from the producer of the card. You have to pick the right one by hand afaik.
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10-27-13, 07:17 PM   #12
10leej
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Just got WoW up and running fine on ubuntu. Really had difficulty installing it, wound up having to use a friends windows computer to download it and copied it to an external drive hope game updates are easier to manage.
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10-27-13, 10:45 PM   #13
Rilgamon
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Updates work with the original launcher ... but here the new battle.net client crashes ...
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10-27-13, 10:53 PM   #14
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Originally Posted by Rilgamon View Post
Updates work with the original launcher ... but here the new battle.net client crashes ...
Uh, kinda figured as much. I like that new launcher too.
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