Well, after many trials and tribulations I have set up World of Warcraft on my linux partition. I ran into several problems along the way of doing so. It makes me so happy to say that I didn't waste a full day of reading to find out how to do this.

The first problem I ran across was Direct3D support. Wine (Windows Emulator) doesn't support D3D at all. So what was happening was I would launch WoW and then get hung up for awhile by 1fps speeds; I couldn't do a thing like this! Seeing that D3D was a no-go, I then tried OpenGL to see if that would cut the mustard. Sure enough, it didn't even load!

After coming to terms that a plain flavor of Wine wasn't going to do the trick for me, I made a vent post in #snoopy. I was then told to get Cedega (aka. WineX) because it has DirectX support. I gave it a shot but it also didn't work out for me. I bounced back and forth trying patches here, fixes there, and I even went in circles and repeated some of my mistakes!

After some careful googling and a few more vent posts in IRC channels, I stumbled across this wonderful page. It was a shell script that did automatically did what I did by hand about six times. "F*ck this," I said to myself again and again, "I give up." Then I had a breakthrough: "Error: Could not start 3D acceleration!"

Seeing this message stabbed me in the heart and woke me up a bit. "Perhaps I don't have the correct video drivers?" I thought to myself. Sure enough, I was using a generic "nv" driver for my video rather than a solid nVIDIA driver. I went all over the place looking for a driver and came up empty handed. Then I thought I'd check the Ubuntu package database. Sure enough it had what I needed (and I didn't have to recompile my kernel like a shell script said I would ). I did a test or two and found that I indeed had 3D acceleration going (yes!).

So I reinstalled cvscedega along with Wine (with WoW patches that I got working up; there was an ubuntu package for WoW with Wine, but that didn't work out well either :#). I did the usual "wine WoW.exe" command and waited....it popped up and it wasnt laggy! I just had a regular mouse pointer over the finger that you see when you launch WoW. I'm sure there's a fix for this somewhere, but I thought I'd try OpenGL again to see if that'd work. Sure enough it did...with no mouse bugs!

Yes, I'm a Linux newbie, but I sure did learn a lot from this experience. Now World of Warcraft runs smooth as ever on my Linux partition just like my Windows one. Even though my knowledge of this system is limited, it is growing daily. If you would like to set up WoW on a Linux partition and are like me (tried basicly every guide on the Internet) and can't get it running, post a comment, e-mail me, catch me on IRC, etc. and I'll see what I can do to help out. I would like to extend a special thank you to Max for pointing me in the direction of Cedega.

Earlier this week, I purchased a used copy of Golden Sun off of Amazon dot com. It finally arrived at my house this afternoon! I have been searching far and wide for this game for quite some time. I couldn't even find it on eBay (of all places!). I am currently waiting for my GBA to build up a steady charge so I can take a day out and play. The last time I really sat down and played on my Game Boy was, oh I'd say, 6-7 months ago. Needless to say, I'm happier than a thirteen year old boy with a Hustler in his left hand. I also ordered an old, old copy of Lufia & The Fortress of Doom this last Monday. I've played the game on an emulator, but have been longing to obtain a hard copy for the longest time. For those of you who don't know about the game, I suggest you read this page. I got || this close to beating the game when I had it on my emu, but then my HDD crashed . I can't wait for this game to get here, too. I'll be busy, busy, busy when it comes