Guide: Getting the game to run under Linux (with Wine)

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Guide: Getting the game to run under Linux (with Wine)dakira01/18/2009 - 23:35

Since so many folks are having problems getting this to run in wine (garbled graphics or stuttering sound) I thought it might be a good idea to post a little guide. I posted a small howto inside another topic, but I think this way it might reach more people.

So.. as mentioned above the two problems people have are stuttering sound and messed up graphics (like missing textures). The first problem is usually caused by pulseaudio, which is the new default soundserver in Ubuntu and Fedora. The graphics-problem can be solved by explicitly telling wine which way to use OpenGL. So lets go:

1. GET THE LATEST WINE
Make sure you are using the latest development version of wine. Go to winehq.org's download page, pick your distro, follow the instructions and install/update wine. Open a terminal and run winecfg once, to create your local default wine install. Exit.

2. INSTALL WORLD OF GOO
In Ubuntu just right-click the installer and select "Run with wine". If you don't have that option open a terminal, navigate to the directory with the installer and run "wine WorldOfGooSetup.1.30.exe".

3. FIX THE SOUND
Open a terminal and run winecfg to open the configuration tool. Go to the audio tab and change the default driver from ALSA to OSS. Save and exit. Now open your distributions package-management-software and install the alsa-oss package. Now open the texteditor of you choice (e.g. gedit) and open the WorldOfGoo.desktop in your Desktop-folder. There is a line that reads
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.wine" wine "C:\\Program Files\\WorldOfGoo\\WorldOfGoo.exe"
Change that to
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.wine" aoss wine "C:\\Program Files\\WorldOfGoo\\WorldOfGoo.exe"
and save the file. Now the OSS sound of WoG is piped to the ALSA soundserver which then correctly pipes it to pulseaudio. Please don't ask me why it doesn't work when you use ALSA directly, but this solves the sound issues for me in all games where I had them since Ubuntu switched to pulseaudio (e.g. World of Warcraft).

4. FIX THE GRAPHIC PROBLEMS
Open a terminal window, type regedit and press enter. This will start the Wine equivalent of the windows registry editor. If you are familiar with using the registry editor under windows then this is pretty much the same.
4.1 Find this key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\
Highlight the wine folder in the left hand pane by clicking left on it. The icon should change to an open folder
4.2 Right-click on the wine folder and select [NEW] then [KEY]
4.3 Replace the text New Key #1 with OpenGL
4.4 Right-click in the right hand pane and select [NEW] then [String Value]
4.5 Replace New Value #1 with DisabledExtensions (Notice it's case sensitive!)
4.6 Then double click anywhere on the line, a dialog box will open.
4.7 In the value field type GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object

5. FIX PANELS APPEARING IN-GAME
In some cases the Gnome-panels appear inside the game. This is a known wine-bug which supposedly will be fixed soon. To work around it you have two options
5.a Press ALT+ENTER to switch to windowed mode, and then press ALT+ENTER again to go back to fullscreen mode.
5.b You can set up a virtual Desktop to run the game in. To do that open winecfg in a terminal, go to the Graphics tab and tick the checkbox for Emulate virtual desktop. Set the desktop-size to 800x600. Alternatively you can set it to your desktops default resolution and change the resolution in the file /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/WorldOfGoo/properties/config.txt to match it (replace username with your username). This way you can play WoG at your full desktop resolution.

6. PLAY THE GAME
Just double-click the icon on your desktop and have lots of fun.

I hope this helps people solve issues they might have when playing this game in Linux. Feel free to post questions if you still run into problems.

Cheers
dakira

PS: Point 4 was taken directly off the Ubuntu Wiki [url=https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft#Registry configuration]entry[/url] for World of Warcraft released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License