World of Warcraft / TBC Installation under SuSE 11/Wine 1.0

Still kicking myself for this one; I should have seen it earlier but I figure if this hasn’t been made public, or if it’s been touched on before, by all means I would suggest bringing this up again.

This was performed on an Acer Aspire 5100 laptop, AMD Turion 64 x2 TL-50 CPU, 3 GB DDR2 RAM, OpenSuSE 11/KDE 4.

Run winecfg with the following configurations:

  • Set riched20, riched32, msxml3 to native
  • Set Wine to run as Windows XP

Load WoW CD 1 into the CD/DVD-ROM drive. From a terminal, you can either drop into the CDROM directory and run wine installer.exe or browse to the executable, right-click, Open with and hit “Wine”. You should see the install window appear on your screen, click “Install World of Warcraft” and you’re on your merry way.

When the program prompted for disc 2, I wasn’t able to get wine to eject the drive (wine eject d: ) (wine eject -a); I wound up having to navigate to the device notification icon in my systray, pull up the list of devices, and press the Eject button. Swap out the CDs, have SuSE open the contents in Dolphin, and the installation picks up again. Rinse and repeat for the final two discs and presto - WoW was installed.

TBC was a bit trickier; I tried copying the contents of the disc to my hard drive but I wasn’t able to get the installer to launch when I clicked “Install The Burning Crusade” inside the window. Changed winecfg from Windows XP to Windows 98, saved the configuration, and to my surprise - the installation went off without a hitch. Same as before in swapping the discs; hit the Device Notification icon, press the Eject button next to the disc, swap out CDs, open the contents in Dolphin…finished the installation.

I’ve yet to actually test the program, but so far the installation held up. Not bad for an old alpha geek who’s been out of the loop. :cool:

YMMV regarding winecfg - you may need to run Wine as Windows 2000 or Vista in order to get the WoW or TBC installer to work.

You could make ejecting disc’s easier by running “wine /path/to/install.exe/”. I also found this helpful wine guide, but ignore the Ubuntu part, it’s still wine. The appdb page for WoW also mentions a tweak you should make for WoW so that it will run with acceptable performance.
As for the game, well, lets just say I’ve already wasted > 1,000 hours already… :stuck_out_tongue: