This one is for all you gamers out there. Did you know (I know, you probably did) that World of Warcraft will work on an Ubuntu system? You just need to add a few things to get it going but its really not hard at all. I have been playing for some time now (although I don’t get to as much as I’d sometimes like). Below are instructions for installing and running World of Warcraft on an Ubuntu system. (Thanks goes to this page for original information)

You’ll need to install the latest version of WINE for World of Warcraft to be able to function. You can do that the following ways (depending on your Ubuntu version)

    deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main (Edgy Systems)
    deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main (Dapper Systems)
    deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt breezy main (Breezy Systems)

      After you’ve installed the appropriate line to your repositories you’ll need to run the following two commands:

        sudo aptitude update
        sudo aptitude install wine

        The next step is to copy all files from your World of Warcraft CD’s to a directory on your hard drive (overwrite when prompted). This, of course, will take a few minutes.

        When this is finished run:

        ALT-F2 : wine path/to/warcraft/installation/Install.exe

        (you can also optionally copy the World of Warcraft folder from a Windows installation.)

        You’ve now got World of Warcraft installed and just about ready to play. You’ll want to tweak one more thing before you get going though.

        World of Warcraft seems to work best using OSS audio. To set this you can do the following:

        ALT-F2 : winecfg

        In the resulting menu select “Audio” and then select “OSS driver”

        .. and then one last thing before you get playing. You’ll need to add a few lines to a configuration file and then you should be in business.

        ALT-F2 : gksudo gedit path/to/warcraft/installation/WTF/config.WTF

        add the lines:

        SET SoundOutputSystem “1″
        SET SoundBufferSize “100″
        SET gxApi “OpenGL”

        Happy gaming. Ooh, I nearly forgot. To launch Warcraft you can use the following command or create a launcher with this path:

        wine path/to/warcraft/installation/WoW.exe

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        Comments

        55 Responses to “How to install & play World of Warcraft : Ubuntu (5.10 / 6.06.1 / 6.10)”

        1. roger on December 20th, 2006 2:07 am

          what is the point in copying from ubuntu wiki to your website and if you could try to write your own articles that would help more people instead of copying most of the articles from ubuntu wiki,ubuntu forums and ubuntu hacks book

        2. Aaron Toponce on December 20th, 2006 8:48 am

          Roger-

          And what are you doing to contribute back to the community? Just curious.

          Helping more people? This blog has been Dugg a number of times, because of the tutorial offered here, and has an average daily visit of ~1000 hits.

        3. Daddywifi on January 2nd, 2007 4:00 pm

          I am wondering if you might be able to assist me in a workaround for a game I love called SpiritWars http://www.spiritwars.com Thanks

        4. Jason on January 16th, 2007 9:40 pm

          This HowTo will let you install and run the expansion too :) have fun raiding

        5. Jason on January 16th, 2007 9:47 pm

          HMM, strike that.. video problems for me once in game.. No portrait of character when creating one and black world when playing.. lets see if I can figure out a soulution

        6. CheatMan on January 28th, 2007 2:39 pm

          I get the same problem as Jason. I haven’t been able to find a solution just yet. Sorry guys, maybe I post something on the forums if I get it working.

          One more thing though, at some point in time it worked. Maybe it’s because of an update from Blizzard. Just a thought.

          Cheers,
          CheatMan

        7. baavgai on February 10th, 2007 8:31 am

          The Audio tip for config changed fix a problem, thanks. Note, my config.wtf was actually Config.wtf, linux is case picky.

          Note, it’s probably not a bad idea to do Launcher.exe, instead.

          To Jason, try “wine WoW.exe -opengl”, that should get it working for you.

        8. World of Warcraft Ch on February 18th, 2007 9:08 pm

          Installed smoothly for me.

        9. Gibsonep on March 20th, 2007 7:48 pm

          Hey, I just installed World of Warcraft with wine. I use KDE on my laptop. After I installed it and thought I did everything that installation process requires, I ran it and the game quits out after the opening video. I am very new to Linux and cannot figure out why this is not running correctly. If you could help me out that would be great. thanks.

        10. wow gold on March 26th, 2007 10:51 pm

          i didn’t have a problem thanks to this

        11. laotzu on April 10th, 2007 6:18 pm

          i didnt even bother to copy the files from the installation cd’s of warcraft onto my computer i simply opened the installer.exe from the 1st wow cd using wine and then the installer ran just like in windows, same as installing burning crusade just right clicked on the installer.exe and selected open with wine

        12. craig on April 15th, 2007 7:58 am

          i am in the config trying to fix the the way the game is going but the ones i need to change are not even there can someone help me get around this problem…

        13. Confused on April 19th, 2007 6:05 pm

          I am stuck at step:

          ALT-F2 : wine path/to/warcraft/installation/Install.exe

          I brought up the RUN COMMAND WINDOW THINGY, and put in everything past the colon. I didn’t get any confirmation if anything had been done, but I’m guessing I haven’t installed wow. Nothing thereafter works. I can bring up winecfg, and by default OSS is checked. But I can’t run:

          ALT-F2 : gksudo gedit path/to/warcraft/installation/WTF/config.WTF

          It won’t do anything, and I get an error. No, I’m not copying the “ALT-F2 :” into the RUN line.

        14. tipalm on May 11th, 2007 11:17 pm

          Are you typing in “path/to/warcraft/installation/”?

          cause that shouldn’t be those words it should be the actual path.

        15. Desiree on June 9th, 2007 11:21 am

          hi my name is desirwee and i was wondering if any of you no where i can play world of warcraft for free by installing it.

        16. Desiree on June 9th, 2007 11:22 am

          hi

          does any one of you no how to play world of warcraft for free by installing or downloading the game for free

        17. FreeTrial on June 22nd, 2007 7:18 am

          You can download a Free 10-Day trial of WoW. It is pretty big at a couple of Gigabytes. Installed, it is around 3.7-Gb, then you have some more downloading, to get all the patches since January’07.

          After your 10-days are finished, you will have to start paying about $15/month.

          Or, you can Try FLYFF or Rappelz, which are free, and free to play. FLYFF is very cartoonish & Rappelz looks a lot like Guild Wars.

        18. freyyr890 on July 9th, 2007 3:54 pm

          Don’t forget Silkroad Online.

        19. cham on July 9th, 2007 9:44 pm

          hi.
          im still having a hard time installing WOW.. what should I do.. Is there any problem with my pc? Actually, it is already installed but when I click the WOW icon for me to play the game.. it says.. “Failed to find a suitable display device. Exiting program.” ugh.. im not good at computers.. i just want to play.. help?

        20. warcraft fan on July 28th, 2007 6:59 pm

          what do you mean by

          “After you’ve installed the appropriate line to your repositories you’ll need to run the following two commands:

          sudo aptitude update
          sudo aptitude install wine”

          need to run? how and were do you go to run something or add commands?
          don’t understand that..
          Thanks

        21. Confused on August 1st, 2007 2:15 pm

          how in do i get to my directory?

        22. danny on August 2nd, 2007 1:41 am

          i got wow and everything working but the vidio is just horrible? how do i fix it?

        23. archie on August 9th, 2007 1:01 pm

          i can`not down load cd on to hard drive windows plus 98 can you help me please

        24. mustafa.jt on August 28th, 2007 6:04 am

          wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

        25. shaquille on August 28th, 2007 7:35 am

          it alway exitin out an it is have somthing bout shock wave it is say u need to in somthing

        26. shaquille on August 28th, 2007 7:37 am

          i jus need to play it do something

        27. CorpseVomit on September 6th, 2007 11:19 am

          Hey guys, I followed the instructions and got it installed w/o any probs. It does not seem to want to load the game to play. I get the loading app icon on the task bar and then it goes away after about 15 secs. I am running Kubuntu w/ the newest version of wine.

          Here is my command for the shortcut:
          wine /home/randy/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WoW.exe

          and the working path:
          wine /home/randy/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WoW.exe

          Any suggestions would be great. :)

        28. CorpseVomit on September 6th, 2007 11:22 am

          UPDATE: about 5 mins after posting this I got a Blizzard popup saying that WOW crashed.

        29. CorpseVomit on September 8th, 2007 12:14 pm

          I installed Crossover Standard and got WOW running 1st time. Using Kubuntu (64bit) and getting about 20fps better than windows xp (32bit) was. Another reason I’ll never go back to windows.

        30. conor on September 15th, 2007 1:48 am

          how do I play the actuall game

        31. ladydeth on October 8th, 2007 11:34 am

          anyone else getting 131 errors when using Ubuntu Gutsy? Ive tried all the tips and tricks and nothing is working….

        32. ladydeth on October 8th, 2007 11:36 am

          forgot to add that Ive tried Wine 46 and 45….since I have crossover and cedega accounts, gonna try them too.

        33. ladydeth on October 8th, 2007 6:24 pm

          Crossover has the same problem….

        34. Buzz on October 17th, 2007 1:59 pm

          “Hey guys, I followed the instructions and got it installed w/o any probs. It does not seem to want to load the game to play. I get the loading app icon on the task bar and then it goes away after about 15 secs.”

          Getting the same issue here, not using Kubuntu though.

        35. emod on October 24th, 2007 2:29 am

          after instaling wine and asking for winecfg, i got this message:

          root@emod:~# winecfg
          Warning: the specified System directory L”c:\\windows\\system32″ is not accessible.

          is an error message or not, because when i made the next step and giving the path for my instaler i got the same message and a pop-up message with: “Sorry, the installer was unable to start up. You may be out of hard drive space.” But i have a lot of space (>20GB). how can i fix this?

          i want to mention i tried to manualy create the “system32″ folder in the windows dierctory, but it didn’t helped me.

          thank you for any advise.
          regards

        36. Bondionata on November 19th, 2007 8:04 am

          Nice page.. had a few problems, and this page had a few more hints that i didnt know.
          Didnt solve my problem though..
          Problem being that the game loads ok, even though i cant see portrait or anything when i have logged in, but pressing “enter world” starts the game, and it sort of runs for a minute and then crashes.
          I expect its problems with the driver.
          Currently using ATI’s driver for my radeon 9800 card.

          regards

        37. world of warcraft on March 14th, 2008 2:55 pm

          hi i need to install world of warcraft online can you help me?

        38. Bassem on April 6th, 2008 10:54 am

          I ran War craft ||| , but the graphics suck …. plus its too slow :S … i have ATI radeon
          VGA card … any clue ?

        39. YankeeFan on April 17th, 2008 8:32 pm

          I am trying to install WOW on my Laptop. I already installed the latest version of wine unto my pc. However when i put in the WOW DVD and copy all the files over to my desktop i do not see the installer.exe file. In fact even when i mount the DVD and browse into the folder and turn on “show hidden files”, there is no installer.exe file listed. What am i supposed to do? WOW is the only reason why i have not yet switched over fully from microsoft to linux. Please help.

        40. Featalene on May 31st, 2008 12:19 pm

          I have a new laptop and want to get WoW working. It is a Dell Latitude D630 with Intel 965 express chipset video. I have loaded Ubuntu Hardy Heron. The standard Ubuntu screens look great. The WoW opening screen is mostly dark and I can’t see the toons in the character select screen. In the game there is no color, just gray ghosts of my characters and mountains. Anyone have an idea of the problem other than the driver is not working? Anyone have a fix?

        41. Dark on June 7th, 2008 9:58 am

          It worked, then blizzard patched now it doesn’t, ubuntu has issues with the 3d acceleration with wow causing the graphics to run poorly, not load, ect…

        42. Eric on June 15th, 2008 7:28 am

          To YankeeFan, don’t know if you figrued this out yet but to see the files on the DVD you have to ummount the DVD and then run this command from a terminal:

          $ mount -t auto -o loop,unhide /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

          changing your mount points as appropriate.

          Great post!

        43. shaw on June 18th, 2008 3:32 pm

          umm, i have installed WOW on my computer perfectly and when i go to start it, it gives me a WoW critical error. Anyone know how to fix this?

        44. Dylan on July 9th, 2008 6:43 pm

          can i play wow on a old pc

        45. Dylan on July 9th, 2008 6:45 pm

          can you tell me fast i relly dont wunt to buy it if i cant play it is a warst of money

        46. velja27 on July 10th, 2008 5:30 am

          Do i need to install WoW? Cause i have it
          installed already.Tried to run it,it ran but
          with 10 fps (and i had 50-60 on XP) and with
          flashing screen.
          @Dylan depending on ur pc configuration,tell me what u have and i will tell u if u can run WoW(and WoW:TBC).

        47. mandrius on July 12th, 2008 1:16 pm

          Then press alt+f2 and try to open installer.exe.
          Show this:
          -Sorry, the installer was unable to start up-
          No installer data could be found. If this problem persists, please contact Blizzard Technical Support.

          sorry for my english ;)

        48. tb on September 16th, 2008 5:27 pm

          Okay, so, I did everything in this tutorial without a problem until I came to the part with the configuration file.

          I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it!
          When I open up the file, there’s nothing in it, and if I add the lines and try to save, I get an error message.

          Please help me! I’m running 8.04 Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so it should be a pretty simple fix. I hope.

        49. tb on September 16th, 2008 5:31 pm

          Okay, nevermind. I just realized this tutorial is for Ubuntu 5.10 / 6.06.1 / 6.10

          Wow. I’m sorry.
          :]

        50. Samos255 on October 18th, 2008 10:55 am

          Ok my problem is: When i want to start WoW It Says Critical Error ……
          In xubuntu it worked but now i have ubuntu and it dont work
          Pls For what it doing? i want play WoW

        51. Samos255 on October 18th, 2008 10:57 am

          deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main (Edgy Systems)
          deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main (Dapper Systems)
          deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt breezy main (Breezy Systems)

          I dont give this to console can be it by this?
          I already have Wine but i get it from synaptic and no from console commands

        52. evan on October 19th, 2008 1:33 pm

          i would like to play the game

        53. Dom on October 20th, 2008 3:36 pm

          I made it work but no sound and low fps, I guess opengl is causing that.
          There is no way to run it in Direct3D?

        54. opticallaceration on December 1st, 2008 10:19 pm

          yeah well i’m not done installin and i’m no tech man myself but a good way to find your “path/to/warcraft/installation/destination” is to find your Installer file wherever it may be…. **go to (Places & search files) to find your “Installer file” when you find it right click on it go to properties and under Name it says Type: .. .. . Type is your file destination or your path/to/warcraft/installation .. and no disrespect to the tech support guys i know that shit can be overwhelming after telling the 4th person in one day that you cant use your feet to control the mouse…you just might wanna shoot somebody….n’ways PEACE!!

        55. opticallaceration on December 1st, 2008 10:22 pm

          oh yeah i meant ( Installer exe. ) file

          NOT your Installer file…

          word!

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