Curse

Mentos · May 01, 2008, 04:46 PM // 16:46

I am planning on upgrading my laptop from Vista to Ubuntu (yeah, Vista annoys me), but I am not sure if GW will run properly on Ubuntu. If it will, fine, great, but if it doesn't will it work with WINE or not at all? I just want to see if I need to partition my drive and shrink the one I'll use for Vista, or if I can have just Ubuntu running.

emberlights · May 01, 2008, 04:58 PM // 16:58

You need Wine. Despite a few minor graphical glitches, Guild Wars runs great on Ubuntu. I run GW on my laptop using Fiesty Fawn. I don't know about the two latest versions, Gusty and Hardy.

skitzinoc · May 01, 2008, 04:58 PM // 16:58

I just tried GW using WINE on Ubuntu 8.04 last night and got no where with it. According to the WINE AppDB GW is supposed to work just fine (rated as platinum on their site).

I can get GW installed, runs the GW client, but wont start the actual game.

I'm sure there are some Wine settings that can be tweaked to get it to work but I'm no expert with it.

If you have problems getting it to work I would suggest posting on the WINE forums for help. I haven't taken the time to search for fixes to my problem yet but I have used them to get other games running. -http://forum.winehq.org/

Another option is to try PlayOn Linux. It is a front end for WINE that adds in extra support ansd scripts for games. I know PoL has scripts for GW in their "Official Scripts" section, I just have not tried that app yet.

Mentos · May 01, 2008, 05:00 PM // 17:00

Thank you; I'm downloading Ubuntu now and plan on trying it out on a partition to see if it's for me. If GW doesn't work through WINE, I'll have a look at that link and PlayOn Linux.

bg1256 · May 01, 2008, 05:00 PM // 17:00

I just installed GW on Hardy last night. There are a few graphical glitches (mostly incomplete draws on the horizon), but other than that it runs great.

You do need wine, which is easy.

Here are links:

Install wine in Ubuntu: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb
Install GW via WINE: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...rsion&iId=9194

Last night when I installed, all I had to do was change the windows version Wine used to Windows 98. Nothing other than running the .exe was required.

After reading the other responses, I've highlihgted something very important.

lordpwn · May 01, 2008, 05:02 PM // 17:02

It'll run somehow if you disable pixel shaders. Doing that will break the nice water effects and some of the finer details in Nightfall and Eye of the North, though.

Anyways, what kind of video hardware does the laptop have? Intel and Nvidia should work ok but if it's ATI you may be in for a lot of trouble: ATI's proprietary Linux driver is slow and has tons of bugs ranging from corrupted mouse cursors on some chips to memory leaks and system freezes when a program does something they didn't think of.

There's a working open source driver with 3D acceleration for older ATI hardware, but for newer stuff you'll have to stick with ATI's proprietary crap.

skitzinoc · May 01, 2008, 05:18 PM // 17:18

Perhaps thats my issue with GW in Wine, running a Radeon 3850 with the ATI drivers.

I also came across a post on another site saying if you are running a 64 bit linux install you need to install the 32 bit compatibility library. It didn't make it clear if this is needed for WINE or for certain games/apps.

Mentos · May 01, 2008, 05:32 PM // 17:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordpwn

It'll run somehow if you disable pixel shaders. Doing that will break the nice water effects and some of the finer details in Nightfall and Eye of the North, though.

Anyways, what kind of video hardware does the laptop have? Intel and Nvidia should work ok but if it's ATI you may be in for a lot of trouble: ATI's proprietary Linux driver is slow and has tons of bugs ranging from corrupted mouse cursors on some chips to memory leaks and system freezes when a program does something they didn't think of.

There's a working open source driver with 3D acceleration for older ATI hardware, but for newer stuff you'll have to stick with ATI's proprietary crap.

Oh dear. My graphics card is an ATI (the X1200--not too good if I am to believe what I've heard, but it's worked for me so far). Would this be compatible with the open-source driver or not?

lordpwn · May 01, 2008, 07:18 PM // 19:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mentos

Oh dear. My graphics card is an ATI (the X1200--not too good if I am to believe what I've heard, but it's worked for me so far). Would this be compatible with the open-source driver or not?

Nope. The current X.org open source "radeon" driver only has (reverse-engineered) 3D support up to the Radeon 9000 series. There's a new open source driver called "radeonhd" in progress based on the hardware documentation ATI's been releasing since their merger with AMD, but it doesn't have any 3D support right now.

I tried the game once in Ubuntu with my work laptop (Radeon X1250) and it ran at about 60% of the framerate I'd get in Windows. Wine's DirectX support wasn't very good back then and the game wasn't stable. Wine's been steadily improving so it should work better now.

ATI's drivers haven't made a lot of progress though - I stopped bothering with them after some new version that took me half an hour to install made GW crash on startup

Mentos · May 01, 2008, 07:57 PM // 19:57

I think I'll partition my hard drive, then--have a portion (a quarter should be plenty) running Vista for gaming, and the remainder running Ubuntu. I'll have to buy a Vista disc, then (the laptop didn't come with one, for some reason), but I should be able to get one fairly easily.

cebalrai · May 01, 2008, 08:13 PM // 20:13

I used to run GW on Mepis with no problems (other than an hour or so of fiddling with WINE before I got it working).

Miss Eisei · May 02, 2008, 05:54 PM // 17:54

only downside to running thru playonlinux/wine is that u have to use win98 or it wont run, and so u have to run it with DX8

i run Hardy + Cedega , thus giving me DX9 support and better Gfx
sadly atm u have to run the game without GLSL so u cant get the same effects as on a windows system, this is due to nvidia changing stuff in drivers , it will mostly be fixed in the next version of Cedega that is in development , however not a big thing, game still looks good enough

http://4lt4.mine.nu/images/gw_cedega_001.png

Mentos · May 02, 2008, 09:43 PM // 21:43

Unfortunately, I'm not going to run Ubuntu now--as much as I would love to, my copy of Vista just committed suicide when I installed it using the automatic partitioner. I'd gladly try it out again, though, but I'm having some serious issues getting online (wirelessly; I'm on a laptop). Most prominently, the troubleshooting article points me to a location that doesn't seem to exist (System > Preferences > Hardware Information). From what I've seen from the very brief period I did get to use it, it looks like a great OS--I could run Vista on a virtual machine on Ubuntu, right?