What Am I In For? WoW and Gentoo

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bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:32 pm

I've used Gentoo at work for right at a year now. I've installed it 6 or 7 times and I am now at the point where I can troubleshoot basic problems that go with an install by myself.

I want to take the next step and put Gentoo as my "main" desktop OS. (Mac OS X on my macbook still for school).

The only game I really play is WoW. That's about it.
What kind of battle am I in for? Is the guide that stickied any good?
I have a 256 DDR3 7600 gt video card. I get about 45-60 fps in WoW. Will running it under Gentoo hamper it any? If so how much?

(A slight hampering is fine)

While this is not game related, I do watch quite a bit of anime and other various movies on my desktop. Should/will I have much trouble getting this to run?

I am planning on keeping my gentoo install and accessing my windows partition when needed. I may even buy VMware if I have to.

Thanks for any advice!

Alex

rndusr · Post by **rndusr** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:43 pm

For the WoW thing you would like to look at this:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_an ... _with_wine

As for the movies, you will not have any problems with that. There are excellent movie players available, like mplayer or xine.

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:06 pm

Thanks for the guide. It sure sounds like an adventure.

lol

Hyper_Eye · Post by **Hyper_Eye** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:48 pm

It's not hard to setup WoW and it runs flawlessly in most cases. If you are trying to decide how you want to go about running WoW look at my post on the Cedega forums discussing WoW under Wine compared to WoW under Cedega:

http://www.cedega.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=50223#50223

No matter which way you do it you should find it to be pretty straightforward. Installing and running under Cedega will present an experience closer to the ease of installing it in Windows but installing in Wine is not difficult either.

NeoWolf · Post by **NeoWolf** » Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:53 pm

Honestly Gentoo is the first linux distro I've been able to really call home and I don't regret it one bit. The install was quite the learning experience but it sounds like you're past that. Believe me, getting WoW up and running was easy after that. (I did it with Wine, just followed the guide!) As for performance, Windows has never touched this machine outside of a VM but I get better performance with slightly lower (but similar) hardware in comparison to my boyfriend running Vista. (Granted that part kinda gimps him on this.)

vputz · Post by **vputz** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:51 am

Myself... eh, I have WoW working under Wine and honestly it's a very noticeable performance hit compared to windows. It's amazing that it works at all, and that's impressive, but I'm afraid it doesn't hold a candle--at least not a really bright one.

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:00 am

How about Cedega? What video card are you running? Specs?

vputz · Post by **vputz** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:08 am

From what I hear, stick with Wine, as it's actually better than Cedega, but I can't honestly vouch for that.

I'm honestly not sure what's with my setup--even under Windows I'm not getting frame rates I think I should (with a dual-core Opteron and a GeForce 8800GTS, I feel that 10-20 fps during raid situations is a bit low; maybe I'm just in UI addon hell, as changing my video options does nothing). Under Linux, it's a bit less than Windows in solo content (I don't raid under Linux as while I've gotten Teamspeak2 working with WoW, everyone complains that I cut out periodically).

dhris · Post by **dhris** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:28 am

vputz wrote:Myself... eh, I have WoW working under Wine and honestly it's a very noticeable performance hit compared to windows. It's amazing that it works at all, and that's impressive, but I'm afraid it doesn't hold a candle--at least not a really bright one.

That has been my experience as well. I have a 6600 GT and under Windows WoW runs really well with stuff mostly cranked. I installed it on the Linux side and it's good enough that I play on it all the time, but I haven't felt like getting rid of my Windows partition. Framerates are actually pretty good although I have to turn down the graphics compared to Windows, but my biggest complaint is the stuttering sound. You can do some edits that mostly fix it but it still occasionally crops up and is quite annoying.

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:46 am

The sounds is weird on my windows side. Cant' wait to see how it is on linux. I would put up with 30 constant everywhere just to not have to use Windows.

8800 I've read on the WoW forums have been having trouble.

Hyper_Eye · Post by **Hyper_Eye** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 4:56 pm

vputz wrote:From what I hear, stick with Wine, as it's actually better than Cedega, but I can't honestly vouch for that.

I'm honestly not sure what's with my setup--even under Windows I'm not getting frame rates I think I should (with a dual-core Opteron and a GeForce 8800GTS, I feel that 10-20 fps during raid situations is a bit low; maybe I'm just in UI addon hell, as changing my video options does nothing). Under Linux, it's a bit less than Windows in solo content (I don't raid under Linux as while I've gotten Teamspeak2 working with WoW, everyone complains that I cut out periodically).

You are using the Linux version of TS right? The Linux client works without any issue for me. The sound is clear in and out and I can use push-to-talk. I didn't have to do anything special. I just installed it and was off. Make sure that they are using GSM or Speex for the codec as I found some of the other codecs to be iffy with Linux. I am using Speex 9.3kbit with mine. I could up the bandwidth a little but it sounds pretty good as it is.

Tariella · Post by **Tariella** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:15 am

I'm running WoW on wine now since almost a year and it is working quite stable here, meaning that I have maybe one crash in 2 months or even less often.

My System is amd64, 64bit wine, 64bit graphics drivers nvidia (I think its a 660gts), various 32bit libraries for compatibility (don't know if they are needed for Wow though).
When I first had an ati card installed it crashed more often, even had hard lockups (might have been the drivers or my amd64 setup anyways), but then I swapped cards with a friend and on the "new" nvidia card it works like a charm, so ymmv

Teamspeak2 is running well, I just have to start it before running Wow or I have no micro working (don't ask me why, but I can live with this). What I could not get to work are the overlays that display in Wow the name of the persons who are talking. After WoW patch 2.2 there will be the included voice chat anyways so we won't have to bother with TS2 and overlays anymore.

For installing I just copied over the win installation directory and started with wine. For performance I had to apply the registry hack from the guide.
Good luck

pandaxiongmao · Post by **pandaxiongmao** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:32 am

I play WoW too, but I ran the game on my Windows partition.

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 3:55 pm

Should I boot into my windows partition to patch the game? Or does the Blizz patch work ok in gentoo?

NeoWolf · Post by **NeoWolf** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 5:19 pm

bobber205 wrote:Should I boot into my windows partition to patch the game? Or does the Blizz patch work ok in gentoo?

Works just fine in Wine as well! Windows has never touched my machine.

yuwy · Post by **yuwy** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:11 am

Game plays well under wine, make sure to disable the ARB-something textures (i forget what it is its on the wine app site) and the performance becomes almost 1:1.

neuron · Post by **neuron** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:09 am

for movies/anime I'd never consider using anything other than mplayer to be honest

, most of my friends running windows now also run mplayer because I install it wherever I am

And for wow, I ran it from the wow eu beta, up until about 2 months ago, and I never had any real problems (one or two patches involved installing a patch from appdb.winehq.org to resolve issues, but that's it).

(on a side note, I've also run both teamspeak and ventrilo without issues, although setting up ventrilo was a bit of a pain).

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 8:11 pm

Emerging wine right now. I'm hoping that I can just cd into the directory with WoW.exe and run that.

fiacha · Post by **fiacha** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 10:06 pm

I can't seem to find anyone addressing this question directly on forums, maybe because it's just obvious to most people with enough expertise to be trying to run WoW under Linux in the first place, but... what about addons? Do they all work under Linux because they are written in Lua anyhow? I honestly can't imagine playing without some of the addons I use.

NeoWolf · Post by **NeoWolf** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 10:14 pm

fiacha wrote:I can't seem to find anyone addressing this question directly on forums, maybe because it's just obvious to most people with enough expertise to be trying to run WoW under Linux in the first place, but... what about addons? Do they all work under Linux because they are written in Lua anyhow? I honestly can't imagine playing without some of the addons I use.

You've got it. Add-ons are written in lua. For the most part they work in Windows and MacOS alike. With WINE you're still running the same Windows version. They work fine.

fiacha · Post by **fiacha** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 10:42 pm

Okay thanks for the confirmation... I presumed that must be the case, but it's nice to be positive.

hackerError · Post by **hackerError** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 3:58 pm

bobber205 wrote:Emerging wine right now. I'm hoping that I can just cd into the directory with WoW.exe and run that.

Just remember you may have strange side effects, like non persistent config changes, macros and the like because you won't have WRITE access to your NTFS partition. good luck.

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:02 pm

I have it mounted with ntfs-3g. So I can write can't I?

neuron · Post by **neuron** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:21 pm

bobber205 wrote:I have it mounted with ntfs-3g. So I can write can't I?

yeah, ntfs-3g can write perfectly well.

You could also copy small stuff to an ext3 drive and symlink stuff like data directories. That's what I did to begin with, but it wont work when a patch comes out obviously

bobber205 · Post by **bobber205** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:29 pm

I think for ease when a patch comes out I'll either through virtualbox or actually native windows patch the game there.

What Am I In For? WoW and Gentoo

What Am I In For? WoW and Gentoo

What about addons?

Re: What about addons?