Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
It’s been a while since my last post mainly due to laziness but with a little bit of computer trouble aiding my lack of updates. My laptop doesn’t like Windows XP & my Vista disc is scratched beyond all repair so the Ubuntu 10.4 disc I made for a nerdy/rainy day made the cut. Starcraft II released shortly before the great hard drive failure so I played it on Windows for a while & fed my addiction for the game. I wasn’t about to give up on playing so I set forth on getting Starcraft II to work on my new operation system & here is a little tutorial on how I got it to play:
Cedega is dead for the most part & Crossover Games costs money so I gave Wine & PlayOnLinux/Wine a try. I’ll provide the way to install the game simply using Wine a try first:
How to Run Starcraft II With Wine 1.2
- Download & Install Wine 1.2 (In my case I use Ubuntu w/ installation via Synaptic Package Manager)
- Open a command line / terminal window & type the commands listed below
- cd ~/Downloads
- wget http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/winetricks
- chmod +x winetricks
- ./winetricks droid fontfix fontsmooth-rgb gdiplus gecko
- ./winetricks vcrun2008 vcrun2005 allfonts d3dx9 win7
- winecfg
The winecfg command will open the Wine configuration. You will notice tabs along the top with one titled Libraries. The Libraries tab will list a war load of libraries. What we went to do is add mmdevapi to the overrides then edit/disable it. After mmdevapi is added & disabled click on the audio tab and choose Alsa.
With any luck at this point you should be able to play Starcraft II on Linux.
How to Run Starcraft 2 With PlayOnLinux
PlayOnLinux is the easiest option since it will automate the process of installing SC2 via Wine (for the most part). Use these steps to get the game up and running:
- Download PlayOnLinux for your specific Linux distribution (If you use Ubuntu download the newest version via the official website to get the newest version)
- Click on install & select Starcraft II from the Games menu
- Go through the step by step process (note if you install from the DVD it will take a long time for PlayOnLinux to copy the files from the disc, don’t be alarmed)
- When the game is installed select it & click on “configure this application” from the menu. You’ll want to choose “configure wine” and add then disable mmdevapi in the libraries tab like we did with the Wine howto.
- Play SC2 – Wings of Liberty (hopefully)
Potential solutions for FPS issues:
Starcraft II will likely run slower on Linux than Windows for various reason but you might be able to compensate using these methods:
- Disable Compiz (Using Ubuntu/Wine – System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects > None)
- Upgrade your Nvidia drivers, https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates
- Try lowering your in game graphical settings to compensate
If you have any issues or suggestions please add a comment 
I long for a world where every game is natively cross platform and there’s no drm!
Sweet tutorial! I have a working Windows install, but I also have Gentoo Linux on another drive. This’ll be fun to try.
Thanks!
Use the _development_ release of wine and the Maverick kernel from the PPAs:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install linux-generic-lts-backport-maverick \
linux-headers-generic-lts-backport-maverick
sudo aptitude full-upgrade
Then reboot and enjoy better hardware support and more wine fixes!
Tinus: Thanks for the update, I’m going to test that and possibly add it to the post
So, when I do it, it opens this window that looks like a shell but it’s me@Arden:’/.PlayOnLinux/tmp$ instead of the normal… yeah. I’m new don’t kill me! It gives me some things to type in incredibly tiny writing, which, since i’m like 3ish feet from my screen with bad eyes to begin with was rather annoying. I did type it in right though, and it gives an error.
mount:block device /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try dmesg |tail or so
Yeah… what? I really hate windows and only see it’s use for games and low cost pc’s, but aside from that it makes me rage. I’d rather not have to dual boot, had a pretty bad experience with that on my macbook… just to head off any stating the obvious options. I have a virtual machine as well, but again… this should work. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, I’m new and still learning. Help appreciated!
I’ve tried to install SC2 on Ubuntu. But PlayOnLinux Wizard stayed open even after the installation has finished. The game loads when I click start game on the installation program. But the POL’s wizard just won’t close, and the settings for SC2 never show up on POL…Still trying to find out what’s wrong with it.
Great tut. using 10.04 64bit all i had to do was get the latest version of PlayOnLinux and do the game>starcraft2 POL installed all the required wine updates and packages for me.
mmm i cant find sc2 in the games menu. and i cant open the installation file on the disc because its exe. help me out please! ive installed both wine and playlinux =(