Ahhh. It’s 1.40 pm (ish) and I’m having Coca-Cola and chips for break feast. Nothing better after a night out on the town with friends.
There were five of us out talking, drinking, dancing and just having a good time.
Oh, and since I last blogged (what a strange word, come to think of it…) I got through Christmas with the family, some social activities etc. and did way to little school work. Same old…
See you all in 2007…
Last time I tried to install World of Warcraft under Ubuntu was probably more than six months ago. And a lot has changed since then. I installed it yesterday on my new laptop and the install process was really easy! The hardest part turned out getting the patches for WoW. After a fresh install you need to download approximately 1 GB of patches! And as Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/ has so artistically pointed out, this is not always a trivial task.
I followed the steps mentioned here
http://wiki.kaspersandberg.com/doku.php?id=howtos:wine:worldofwarcraft
and after successfully install also found this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft.
Of course you need a pc capable of actually running World of Warcraft, and you need to have the right drivers installed (usually the 3D drivers for graphics cards are the hard part – this guide does however not cover installing right graphics drivers).
So my advice is to google for the patches you need as the first thing you do, start to download these, and then complete the setup of wine and base install of World of Warcraft while you get the patches.
The files you’re looking fore are
WoW-1.12.0-XXXX-patch.exe
WoW-1.12.x-to-2.0.1-XXXX-patch
where XXXX depends on your preferred language and what servers you play on. For me that would be enGB, as my WoW client is in English, and I play on the European English language servers. Just do a google search for these file names, and some mirrors or torrents should pop up.
So, while you’re downloading the patches you can start installing and configuring Wine. You need a newer version than the one in Edgy Eft. Luckily Wine provides us with a APT repository for the latest wine.
The line you really need is
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main
For details on setting up Synaptic (or by using the console) see http://winehq.com/site/download-deb.
You should now have Wine 0.9.27 or newer installed. From a console run
winecfg
and set under the Applications tab
under the Graphics tab
and under the Audio tab set
Although you can get by without it, WoW likes it if you have a html render installed. So installing Mozilla (for Windows) under Wine is recommended. As of this writing it can be done by issuing the following in a terminal:
wget http://download.mozilla.org/?product=suite-1.7.13&os=win&lang=en-US
wine mozilla-win32-1.7.13-installer.exe
But the Mozilla version might change. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ for details on the current version.
Now you should be ready to start actually installing World of Warcraft. Copy the content of the four install cd’s into one directory, overwriting where need be, and run the installer:
wine Install.exe
Now, the installer should run without trouble and you should almost be able to run WoW now. However, you might want to do the following for better performance.
Edit the file ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf
As one of the top lines you will see SET gxResolution followed by a screen resolution. Here you can tell WoW your preferred (higher) resolution than the standard.
Also add the following at the end of the file
SET gxApi “opengl”
SET SoundOutputSystem “1″
SET SoundBufferSize “100″
Next, in a console run
wine regedit
And in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine make a new key called OpenGL and in this key make a new String Value with the name DisabledExtensions and the data Value GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object. (If you have trouble figuring out how to add/change these things, just right click until you get it right.)
By now, hopefully the patches you started downloading have finished. So, copy the patches to the World of Warcraft directory
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft
and now you should be good to go.
The installer might have left a shortcut for you on your Desktop and in the Applications -> wine -> Programs -> World of Warcraft menu. But if you can’t find those or the installer didn’t create them, just running
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ wine WoW.exe
should do the job.
Hope to see you in Ironforge…
(Of course there are a lot of tweaking possibilities, optimizations etc. regarding graphics, sound etc. but this should get you started and show that Linux is in fact ready for (some) games!)
The number of computers in the living room has risen by almost 50% lately!
A couple of days ago Esben dragged home a old Macintosh and two days ago my new laptop arrived.
It’s fetching updates for Ubuntu as I write this. I haven’t had time to install the OS before now, because my hand ins for school have been taking up quite a lot of my time. But I got them done and handed in just in time.
So now is (almost) my Christmas vacation. I still have 4 hours of lectures on Monday, but when they are done it is truly vacation time for me.
Of course I haven’t had a opportunity to get a complete picture of what my new laptop can and can’t do. But I have been meaning to get a new one for quite some time now. My current / old one has (in retrospect) been equipped with to few ram from day one. The fact that the keyboard and the sound has been getting unstable and failing from time to time just made the decision to get a new one so much more easy.
So, a lot of things going on right now… well, not really a lot. A lot of important things… well, in the big picture maybe not that important.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out what courses (not) to follow the coming spring. I just found out that I have very few ECTS points left to spend on courses, so picking which ones not to follow turns out to be the hard part. I have until December 10′Th, before I have to decide.
My flatmate has informed me that he has found a dorm room, and will be moving out in January. I had a bit of doubt regarding what to do with the extra room. Should I rent it out again, or would the extra space actually be nice to have?
For now I have decided to not rent it out, but if I start to need the money, of course that can change in the future.
Now, I just need to finish my dinner (chicken and rice) and then I’m off to watch Babel with some friends.
