Well, since I am trying out different operating systems now, I want to see if it is possible to do some gaming under Linux.  You can install Warcraft 2 under Linux using the latest Wine or Cedega (I opted for this and compiled from cvs).  Once I have everything compiled and configured properly with Cedega, I tried to run Warcraft 2 from Linux.  Immediately, I had a few problems.

The first problem, which is the most annoying problem is that the X server doesn’t actually switch over to a 640×480 screen resolution.  The game starts in fullscreen mode, but when I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen, the game screen actually moves up.  If you’ve used Windows XP before where you set the resolution to be very big, and moving the mouse to the edge of the screen moves the entire screen in the direction of your mouse, that’s exactly what’s happening here.  I just couldn’t play the game.

After messing with this for quite a while, it turns out that this is a bug in the default window manager for Xubuntu, Xfce.  Changing my manager over to compiz, by issuing the command "compiz –replace" actually helped solve the problem.  Of all my issues with compiz, I was glad that it helped me out on this one.  By changing over to compiz, I was able to run the game with minor glitches.  The next problem is to connect to Battle.net from Linux.  My first attempt resulted in a segfault and a core dump .

After researching for a bit, I found out that I would need to have Windows font for Battle net to work properly.  I forgot which repository it is in, but I checked all the boxes inside of Synaptic Package Manager.  You can probably find it online too.  So, I just issued the command
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

After about 5 minutes or so, the fonts are installed and I was on Battle.net under Linux!  How cool is that?  Let’s get some games going.

battle net linux · warcraft 2 battle net linux · warcraft 2 linux