This guide is tailored to Ubuntu 10.04 users, but should be similar for any Debian based OS users. I like to think everything is fairly straight forward. I assume you have some sort of basic Linux knowledge before attempting this guide. For example, if you do not know how to navigate around in Terminal, you probably shouldn't try this.

Prerequisites

Before installing Wine or WoW a few things need to be done with your system.

• Update your graphics drivers: Updating your graphic drivers is probably the most important thing to do to ensure stable performance in WoW. Both NVidia and ATI have made great improvement over the past few years in improving the quality of their Linux drivers. Each release seems to increase the stability and performance of their cards.
• Turn off special effects: If you are using Compiz (or an equivalent) turn it off before trying to play WoW. 9/10 times it will severely diminish performance and cause system lockups. If you use Gnome or KDE, I suggest switching to more lightweight option such as XFCE. This is not mandatory, XFCE my desktop environment of choice. If you want to give XFCE a try, in terminal type: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Install and Configuring Wine

Make sure you have the newest version of Wine installed. If you are using Ubuntu, open terminal and type the following:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

The above commands will install the newest version of Wine on your system. At the time of this writing, the newest version is Wine 1.2. After issuing the above commands, type wine --version in Terminal to make sure you have the newest version available. To check the newest version, head over to WineHQ and check the latest Stable Release version.

Generally speaking the newest version of Wine is always the best. Occasionally a bug will occur in a build in which case you will have to manually install a previous version. World of Warcraft is a very well supported game in the Wine community so the chances of such a bug happening are slim.

For now, only one optional change needs to be made in the Wine Configuration. If you are only using a single monitor system, you can probably skip this. If you are using dual (or more) monitors, you should set an emulate desktop. Type winecfg in terminal. Click the Graphics tab, and check the "Emulate a virtual desktop" checkbox. Enter the screen resolution of the monitor you are going to play WoW on under Desktop Size. What this does is create a virtual desktop for Wine programs to run in. This is sometimes needed because certain games may appear distorted or overlap to a second monitor in full screen mode. If you are using Dual Monitors for example, you will need this activated so you can play correctly in full windowed mode and still be able to access your second monitor while playing WoW.

Installing WoW from Scratch

*If you have WoW installed on a seperate Windows partition you can use it rather then installing from scratch. If you do, ignore the installation instructions below and scroll down to Special Cases at the bottom of this post.

After Wine is installed and configured we can start the installation process. This process is pretty straight forward. I am using the WoW Online installer since I do not own the physical WoW discs. You can download the WoW Installer directly from Battle.net here. If this link does not work, login to your Battle.net account and download the Windows version of the WoW Installer.

After the file downloads, open terminal and navigate to the directory where InstallWoW.exe is located and run:

wine InstallWoW.exe

If this is your first time using Wine, the process may take a few extra seconds while configuration files are created. Your screen may also flicker a few times, don't worry, its normal. If all goes well, a screen should pop up asking which version of WoW you want to install. Select WoLK. You should see the following screen shortly after:

WoW Installer downloading the required files to continue.

After the required files are done downloading, you may receive an error about some system components failing the minimum requirements. This is most likely due to Ubuntu not reporting the proper system information.  Ignore any such warnings and click Install.

Ignore any failing minimum requirements warnings.

Next you will be prompted to select an install location for WoW. I personally chose C:\Program Files inside of Wine. You can safely choose whichever directory you want. For future reference, the "C" drive Wine creates is mapped to ~/.wine/drive_c/. In my example, my WoW folder will be: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/

Choosing the WoW Install Directoy.

The longest part of the install when 7.5 GB of WoLK files are being downloaded and installed. I am receiving pretty constant speeds from Blizzards servers of around 800-900KB/s with spikes sometimes around 1.5MB/s. The install part will take a few hours to complete. I would recommend getting to this step before bed.

WOLK Installing

After the base install of WOLK is done, the game will automatically launch the Blizzard updater and patch WoW to the newest version. If all goes well, this should be done automatically, without issue. In my case, Wine froze while updating to Patch 3.3.3. If the game freezes on you during updating, open terminal and type:

sudo killall wineserver
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/Launcher.exe

The launcher should re-launch and the game should continue to upload without any issues.

Configuring WoW

By now WoW should be installed and fully patched. Before running the game, I recommend editing the Config.wtf file before launching WoW for the first time.

#Copy your original Config file to a new location.
cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf ~
#Remove the original
rm ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf
#Create a new Config.wtf file and copy the below inside it
vi ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf

This config file sets all of the performance settings to the lowest possible setting(don't worry, you'll adjust these later. Just for the initial launch it makes life easier), sets OpenGL by default, accepts the TOS and EULA, and sets a low screen resolution.

SET readTOS "1"
SET readEULA "1"
SET readScanning "-1"
SET readContest "-1"
SET readTerminationWithoutNotice "-1"
SET installType "Retail"
SET locale "enUS"
SET movie "0"
SET showToolsUI "1"
SET portal "us"
SET realmList "us.logon.worldofwarcraft.com"
SET patchlist "us.version.worldofwarcraft.com"
SET hwDetect "0"
SET gxWindow "1"
SET gxRefresh "60"
SET gxMultisampleQuality "0.000000"
SET gxFixLag "0"
SET videoOptionsVersion "3"
SET textureFilteringMode "0"
SET Gamma "1.000000"
SET Sound_OutputDriverName "System Default"
SET Sound_MusicVolume "0.40000000596046"
SET Sound_AmbienceVolume "0.60000002384186"
SET farclip "177"
SET particleDensity "0.10000000149012"
SET baseMip "1"
SET environmentDetail "0.5"
SET weatherDensity "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"
SET ffxDeath "0"
SET gxResolution "1024x760"
SET gxApi "opengl"


Now you should be good to boot the game for the first time. You should have a WoW Icon on your Desktop. If you do, double click on it and it will launch the WoW screen. If you do not have a WoW Icon on your desktop, enter the following command in terminal:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/Wow.exe

If you did not have a WoW Icon on your Desktop, look at the bottom of this post to see how to create an Alias to launch WoW through terminal.

From here it is up to you to configure the settings to your liking. I recommend taking it slow, gradually update the settings until you are happy with the performance. Personally speaking, most of my settings are very similar to the settings I would play with in Windows. Both ATI and NVidia Linux drivers have come a long way in recent years. You should not see much a performance loss between playing on Windows or Linux. In some instances, you may even see a performance boost.

AddOns

Generally speaking, all AddOns will work fine under Linux. Rather then manually installing my AddOns, I prefer having a program do the manual work for me. One of my favorite programs for such a task is WoWMatrix. As far as I know, WoWMatrix is the only AddOn updater I know that offers a native Linux client.

Download WoWMatrix Linux version from WoWMatrix and execute the following commands:

#Navigate to where wowmatrix.tar.gz file was downloaded
tar zxvf wowmatrix.tar.gz
./wowmatrix

If all goes well, WoWMatrix should launch and ask where your WoW folder is located. In the window, right click in the white space and click Show Hidden Files. Navigate to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/ - After the folder is selected, accept the license agreement. The rest should be self explanatory.

As with configuring your video performance, I recommend gradually adding AddOns. Make sure none cause issues.

Create a Terminal Alias for WoW

If for some reason a Desktop icon was not created, or you do not use a windows manager, you can create an alias to launch WoW via Terminal. If you use bash, add this to your ~/.bash_aliases file:

alias wow='wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/Wow.exe'

After changes are made to your aliases file, you will need to apply the changes by typing source ~/.bash_aliases in Terminal. From now on you will be able to type wow in Terminal and the game will execute.

Special Cases

Unless you were previously directed to read this section, skip it.

Using an existing WoW Install:

If you already have WoW installed on a Windows partition, you have two options to choose from:

• Running WoW directly from your Windows partition.
• Copying your WoW directory from your Windows partition to your Ubuntu parition.

I am assuming you do not have your Windows partition mounted. If this is the case you will first need to know the which partition your Windows is located:

$ sudo fdisk -l
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13       31871   255897600    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           31871       44648   102631425    5  Extended
/dev/sda5           31871       44029    97654784   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           44029       44527     3998720   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7           44527       44648      975872   83  Linux

Issue the above command. it will display a list off all partitions on your hard drives. Look for the largest NTFS filesystem, this will most likely be your Windows partition. In my case, my Windows partition is located on /dev/sda2.

Now that you know which partition Windows is installed on, execute the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p /media/Windows
#REPLACE /dev/sda2 with your Windows partition.
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/Windows

This will create a directory for your Windows partition to reside in then mount the partition to the newly created folder.  I recommend you copy your existing WoW install your Ubuntu partition. For consistency, we will move your WoW folder to Wine virtual directories. This is not necessary though, the WoW folder can be placed anywhere on your Ubuntu HD.

sudo cp -r /media/Windows/path/to/World\ of\ Warcraft/ ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/

This will take awhile to complete. I suggest starting the copy and walking away for an hour.

If you choose to use your Windows partition to run WoW instead of copying it to Ubuntu, you should automount your NTFS drive on boot. Look up how to by editing your fstab file. I will not cover this in my guide.

Conclusion

If you are at this point, chances are you have a working WoW install. Congratulations!

• Will my old AddOns work?
  Short Answer: Yes.
  
  Long Answer: Yes. Wine runs World of Warcraft. Essentially AddOns add to the existing functionality of WoW. WoW AddOns cannot communicate outside of World of Warcraft. Therefore there should be no compatibility issues. The people over at WoWMatrix even have a native Linux client available. The WoWMatrix client makes updating AddOns as easy as clicking a button. Windows based WoW AddOn clients such as the Curse Client may also work using Wine, I have not tested though.

• Should I install WoW using CD, Installer, or Copy?
  If you have an existing WoW install on another partition, hard drive, or computer I would highly recommend directly copying the entire WoW folder over to your Linux partition. It is by far the fastest way. My second recommendation would be to use the WoW universal installer. The universal installer downloaded the entire game over the internet, eliminating the need for CDs. Depending on your internet connection speed, expect this to take at least several hours. Installing from the CDs should be a final resort. WoW installation over CDs can sometimes be very tricky and time consuming. The extra effort is not worth the extra time the universal installer will take. If you must go this route, and if you have issues with installing from the disks, try copying all data from each disk to one folder on your hard drive and run the installer from that folder. This is a work around for a common problem while installing via the CD.

• Hardware
  Hardware selection is very important, especially while using Linux to play WoW. Generally speaking 4GB of RAM and a dual core processor is a minimum. The graphics card is especially important. Currently a NVidia card will perform better then a comparable ATI card under Linux. This is because ATIs Linux drivers just aren't that good. There has certainly been improvements in the past year, though they have not quite caught up to NVidias Linux drivers quite yet. Do not be scared away if you have an ATI card though. I personally use an ATI Radeon 4870 1GB card. I play on ultra settings and I get 60+FPS while questing/doing dailies. ~40FPS doing BGs other then WG. The biggest downfall of this card is when raiding in >15 groups. Often in large groups I will get between 20-30FPS, sometimes lower. I usually lower my Video settings to medium while doing these activities. Often it is not noticeable, in such a large group it is difficult to determine FPS.

  My Hardware: 4GB RAM, AMD Phenom II x4 940(4 x 3.0GHz), ATI Radeon 4870.

  Something else worth mentioning is the lack of a hardware cursor with OpenGL. This means that the mouse will become sluggish if FPS drop below 30FPS. There is a patch for Wine available that will use the systems hardware cursor. Some functionality is lost though, such as hovering over tooltips. My primary character is a Warlock. I have most my keys bound, making the mouse issue trivial at best. The mouse issue should not be an issue for anyone besides healers or anyone who is a clicker.

• Stablilty
  Stability is the same as would be expected using Windows. I rarely ever have WoW/Wine freeze while playing. If you have issues, I would recommend looking for other possibilities such as bad ram, or AddOns conflicting. I would also recommend running a repair on WoW. I have not run into a Wine specific bug for several months.

• Tips?
  I have a few tips that hopefully will ease the tension of switching from Windows to Linux for World of Warcraft. Most importantly, make sure you have the latest GPU driver available for your card. Drivers are always improving, often fixing issues, and increasing performance. Also make sure all desktop effects are off while running WoW. If you are using Ubuntu/Gnome - Goto: System > Preferences > Appearance ---> Click on Visual Effects, and select None to turn off all effects. This is important, more times then not, WoW/Wine will not run at all with any desktop effects enabled, if it does - expect less then desirable performance.

  I would also suggest using another desktop manager other then GNOME or KDE. Both of these are heavy on resources, when playing WoW every resource is vital. My personal recommendation would either be to use just a Window Manager (OpenBox, FluxBox, etc) or a lightweight desktop environment such as XFCE.
  

The journey to World of Warcraft on Linux will most likely be difficult in the beginning. Don't expect everything to work flawlessly the first time around. Don't give up, the effort will be well worth it. I hope the answered questions above will help to determine if WoW/Linux is right for your system. There are already many great installation guides floating around the internet, I would recommend the installation guide on WoWWiki.

Mangler is an open source VOIP client capable of connecting to Ventrilo 3.x servers. It is capable of performing almost all standard user functionality found in a Windows Ventrilo client. Mangler is developed and maintained by Eric Kilfoil and Daniel Sloof. -mangler.org

In my experience, using Ventrilo on Linux (using Wine) has always been troublesome at best. Often I would have to resort to using hacked patches, or giving up some functionality just so I could use Ventrilo while raiding. Some newer versions would completely break functionality on Wine. This problem has all come to an end with the release of a fantastic new software called Mangler. It was released a month ago. It is a native Ventrilo client for Linux systems. I have used this software flawlessly for a few weeks now. I personally use this software while playing World of Warcraft on Wine. The interface is clean, and supports PTT functionality (both keyboard and mouse options). Mangler also claims to support both GSM and Speex codecs, thought I have only tested it with Speex. Mangler also supports individual user volume control. This is quite a list of functionality for a version 1.0. I consider this a must have piece of software if you need Ventrilo on a Linux system.