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World of Warcraft on Ubuntu Edgy Eft (a howto)

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

Windows Version: Windows XP

under the Graphics tab

Allow the window manager to control the windows
Vertex Shader Support: Hardware
Allow Pixel Shader (if supported by hardware)

and under the Audio tab set

OSS Driver

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_USERSoftwareWine 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!)

computers++

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.

Choices, so many choices

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.

Hurtig opdatering…

Jeg bryder mig ikke om at ‘tvinge’ mig selv til at blogge. På den anden side er det også ved at være mere end bare et par dage siden jeg sidst har skrevet noget her.
Mine nye kurser er startet igen – jeg har nu været igang i en uge, og det er jo meget trygt og hyggeligt. Så ved jeg ihvertfald hvad jeg skal bruge (noget) af min tid på.
Tele2 er også blevet skiftet ud med Fullrate her i lejligheden. Overgangs perioden (5 dage uden internet) var selvfølgelig hård for en net-junkie som mig, men jeg klarede det. Jeg har endnu ikke rigtig haft brug for eller bemærket den forhøjede hastighed, men den skulle være der, og forhåbentlig kan besparelsen på internet og telefoni mærkes på et senere tidspunkt.
Tilgengæld har skiftet af udbyder (og opsætning med en ekstra firewall/modem) givet min freenet node nogle problemer. Den syntes at have svært ved at forbinde til andre. Men det kan være det bare er et konfigurations problem – jeg håber…

So, that’s what censorship looks like…

Danish ISP Tele2 has been forced to censor Russian based website allofmp3.com. I haven’t used allofmp3.com’s service, and don’t plan to in the future, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t interesting and disturbing to me. If IFPI can get the courts to turn off allofmp3.com today, who will get what website turned off tomorrow? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here is a screen shot of what my browser returns when I try to visit http://www.allofmp3.com/:

However, the censorship is not impossible to get around, if you have a little technical skill…

If you were to add the following few lines to your hosts file you should be well on your way to getting around the blocking (for now).

87.242.93.250 allofmp3.com
87.242.93.250 www.allofmp3.com
87.242.93.250 music.allofmp3.com

In a completely unrelated topic, I finished my algebra exam today. It didn’t go as well as I had hoped, but I should be sure of passing (and isn’t that the important part?). It was a written exam, so my final grade is not known yet. Time will tell.

Now I’m (almost) off to get some Julebryg of some sort, and then I have a packed (but interesting) weekend ahead of me. Take care out there (who ever might be listening out there…).

Where did this snow come from?

So, we just finished an October that has been the warmest in many years, hit November first, and then, Bam! Snow. And not the big fluffy snowflakes, that land ever so soft and gently, making a white blanket everywhere. Nope, the kind that are almost rain, but just to add pain and cold have chosen to turn a bit white and frozen and turn to water when they hit the ground. The kind that, with the strong wind we are also having today, combine to just bring pain and cold to anyone foolish enough to venture outside.

So, naturally, today was the day I choose to bring my MC to the shop for 12,000 km check-up and storage for the winter. The trip there was not so bad, although cold. Walking back was the really cold and nasty part. But I finally got home. So now I have 4 months without my MC. Not that I’m going to miss it over the winter. MC riding is really more of a spring/summer kind of thing – at least with danish weather.

Now I think I’ll grep some lunch, read a bit (exam coming up Friday…), and then I actually have to get outside again later. I have to go donate blood at the hospital at four o’clock. If it wasn’t for the weather I might actually look forward to that, but now it’s just something that has be done with.

Sunday with hangover…

I had a nasty hangover this morning. Got a few beers to many last night.

Thursday I went with Rasmus to see Dronningen af Malmø. It started out a bit to slow for my liking, but picked up pace as the story started evolving. All in all a good night. When I came home, my laptop had finally fetched all the packages needed for upgrading from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy Eft and had started the actual update. The update took a long time, but went rather smooth. I still have a few things I need to change but all in all I’m happy with the new Ubuntu. The F-Spot photo manager is one of the new things I really like, and think I will use quite a lot. Also, the Amarok player seems to be a bit more willing to play music without to much lag (generally a good thing for a music player), than it was before I updated.
The new fast and improved start up system doesn’t really impress me much yet, but maybe that’s because I don’t really know what to look for.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!

I JUST FOUND OUT A FEW MINUTES AGO THAT TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, AND WHY NOT JOIN IN THE CELEBRATION?

MY WEEKEND WAS FUN, BUT SO FAR NOT VERY PRODUCTIVE. FRIDAY OLK (OVERLÆGERNES KLUB) THREW A PARTY AT PANUM, AND I SHOWED UP, DID A LOT OF DRINKING, A LITTLE BIT OF TALKING AND NO DANCING AT ALL.
MOST OF MY SATURDAY WAS SPEND WITH A HEAD ACE, BUT IN THE EVENING ESBEN AND RASMUS DID MANAGE TO DRAG ME ALONG FOR ONE BEER AT VERSTERBROS BRYGHUS.

TODAY I HAVE UNFORTUNATELY NOT YET STARTED STUDYING, BUT I DID SOMETHING ALMOST AS IMPORTANT – I HAVE BEEN REARRANGING CLOTHS IN MY CLOSET, TO MAKE A BIT OF SPACE. NOT EXTREMELY EXCITING, BUT QUITE PRACTICAL…

New theme

I have been wanting to make this blog look more ‘fresh’ (in lack of a better word) for some time, and after a lot of tweaking I got the Greenery theme working to my liking. What caused me the most trouble was getting the theme working with the tools I use to mirror this blog to freenet, but when I actually started looking at the documentation for said tools everything went smooth.

On a more serious note, I have finally opened my books (which are actually notes) and started reading today – my algebra exam is in a little more than two weeks (Oh joy!) so I guess I can’t postpone it much longer.

Whiskey!

Yesterday evening I went to Malmö, met up with Joe and went to Slagthuset to taste some whiskey at the Smak af Whisky.

I must admit my knowledge of whiskey is limited, and I usually mix it with cheap cola (I know some people might be sitting in front of their monitors, or what ever they use to experience this blog, going “Heresy! Burn Him!”, but I must admit I do). But I got through without revealing my complete lack of knowledge of the subject.

Some of the whiskeys were good (I’m sure they all were, but good to me), and others were a bit to much. Especially a smoked one had a very nice scent, but tasted to much of… well, smoke.

At the end of the evening we went for a local sausage with mashed potatoes, my first ever. It was far from as bad as I expected (but of course not as good as the whiskeys).