Running Wow On Linux? - Help and Advice

[Ozzey]

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,

[Nuggs]

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.

[Ozzey]

Originally Posted by Nuggs 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

[Nuggs]

Originally Posted by Ozzey 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.

[Ozzey]

Originally Posted by Nuggs 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.

[Ozzey]

Thanks for the info Rilgamon :-)
much apreciated

[Rilgamon]

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.