Linux and WoW... couple of questions.

[Ulfhedinn]

OK so long story short my Macbook had some issues and Linux/windows became my only option. I didn't feel like buying windows so I am now running Unbuntu 14.04.

WoW runs pretty good so far but I have a couple of issues. I cannot connect to the game through the battle net launcher, it will download and update but it fails to connect to the actual WoW servers. Lunching the game dirrectly allows for a connection.

In the installation instructions it was recommended to change to opengl which I did. The game ran but I would get a black flash over most of the screen every 3-5 seconds any time the camera moves. After messing with a bunch of settings I changed to dirrect x 9 (using the in game selection) and it went away. Any ideas on what is up with this?

The game looks pretty good as is but for some reason there is an almost glowing effect on stuff. The brighter the surface the brighter the glow. Areas like Winterspring or when dead (spirit world or whatever) are bright to the point of nearly blinding. I changed my TV settings and the game looked a bit better however I had to change it back after closing the game because my desktop looked really bad.... Trying to get the glow to stop but I don't know what is causing it. I am using my Thunderbolt out, have my Laptop monitor off with lid closed. The glow effect doesn't seem any different if I use the internal screen vs my TV.

Overall the game seems to be running better under Unbuntu... better FPS and the real shocker for me is the laptop is staying far cooler. It is barely warm when playing when it was always hot under osX. WoW does give me a warning at startup that I have an out of date driver. Not sure if it is possible to make it stop doing that and I am pretty sure the one I am using is correct but I am new to Linux so /shrug

Any tips, tricks, answers or whatever would be great.

[Cyanotical]

i use linux everyday, honesty i'd install the latest OSX instead, linux is crap for daily desktop use, dont' let anyone fool you, linux is not good as a desktop OS for anything other than facebook, reinstall OSX

[Riaya]

I am going to assume the bnet client is being installed through Wine. The problem with it is if you install a blizzard game you are not installing any prerequisites along with said game most likely. That is why if you install any steam game you have to do it in separate clients each time. If you can find out what is required to make WoW run and get those installed then you should be fine. My recommendation though would be just stick to the Wow specific wine install.

PS when you use Wine last I checked it will only allow you to use 1 processor while gaming so it would be much more beneficial for you to have either Windows or OSX installed.

[Ulfhedinn]

i use linux everyday, honesty i'd install the latest OSX instead, linux is crap for daily desktop use, dont' let anyone fool you, linux is not good as a desktop OS for anything other than facebook, reinstall OSX

I can't use osX. Normally you can do a download by internet and install but I happen to have one of the very few macbooks where it doesn't work. Another option is to take it to a mac store and they will install it for you but the closest Apple store is over 2 hours away so that isn't happening. I could also download osX from another mac and install that way except I don't know a single person with a mac.

I haven't seen anything that makes me feel linux is any better or worse than OSX. It works and its free... hard to complain about that. I have been around computers long enough that command line stuff doesn't bother me but that isn't as much of an issue anymore.

- - - Updated - - -

I am going to assume the bnet client is being installed through Wine. The problem with it is if you install a blizzard game you are not installing any prerequisites along with said game most likely. That is why if you install any steam game you have to do it in separate clients each time. If you can find out what is required to make WoW run and get those installed then you should be fine. My recommendation though would be just stick to the Wow specific wine install.

PS when you use Wine last I checked it will only allow you to use 1 processor while gaming so it would be much more beneficial for you to have either Windows or OSX installed.

I don't know what wine does... to new to it atm. However the game runs as good or better now with the exception of the odd graphics. One of which I solved.. by turning off deathglow I am not blinding when I die.

[Cyanotical]

It works and its free... hard to complain about that. I have been around computers long enough that command line stuff doesn't bother me but that isn't as much of an issue anymore.

OSX is free and actually works, but if you are as skilled with computers as the 2nd part of that statement would say you are, figuring out how to install mavericks won't be an issue

[Deleted]

I can't use osX. Normally you can do a download by internet and install but I happen to have one of the very few macbooks where it doesn't work

Which Macbook do you have by the way? Reason here being I'm wondering which GPU it has because you can throw a few tweaks into Xorg that tend to improve performance considerable especially if it's an Intel integrated/IRIS.

I haven't seen anything that makes me feel linux is any better or worse than OSX. It works and its free... hard to complain about that. I have been around computers long enough that command line stuff doesn't bother me but that isn't as much of an issue anymore.

Ignore the guy, he's an idiot - there's one on every forum that gets their panties in a twist if someone doesn't use Windows or OS X and moans about it even though they've never even tried it.

I don't know what wine does... to new to it atm. However the game runs as good or better now with the exception of the odd graphics. One of which I solved.. by turning off deathglow I am not blinding when I die.

You could try setting (in config.wtf)
SET ffxDeath "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"
SET M2UseShaders "0"

Did you check the WineHQ post about it, it might have some hints and you can post there for help; https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag...sion&iId=28973

User was infracted for flaming.

[Cyanotical]

Ignore the guy, he's an idiot - there's one on every forum that gets their panties in a twist if someone doesn't use Windows or OS X and moans about it even though they've never even tried it.

ignore this guy^, i know what im talking about, he doesn't

you can keep going at linux if you want, but taking encouragement from people like above will only frustrate you longer, linux is a brilliant OS for many things, desktop OS is not one of them, in fact it is the only area linux falls behind in, and its very far behind

when you're done dealing with wine and all its nonsense (not needed anymore), along with other BS like getting bumblee to work with the latest drivers if you have an nvidia card, you can get OSX installed, pretty easily, i don't even have a mac and i've done it several times for other people's macbooks

[Deleted]

ignore this guy^, i know what im talking about, he doesn't

You've contributed absolutely nothing to this thread - you didnt' reply to his question nor had any real suggestions on how to fix the issue at hand.

If you have nothing worthwhile to say, fuck off from the thread? Is that too hard of a concept for you to grasp?

[Cyanotical]

You've contributed absolutely nothing to this thread - you didnt' reply to his question nor had any suggestions.

If you have nothing worthwhile to say, fuck off from the thread? Is that too hard of a concept for you to grasp?

you must have trouble reading, i recommended he put OSX back on in the very first reply to the thread


you need to take into account the user getting the best experience from their computer, by recommending linux, on a macbook no less, you are telling the OP to go bang his head against a wall for hours on end and hopelessly search forum threads for support

or he could reinstall OSX and be done with it, have an OS that is already tailored for his hardware and have native support for wow, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out, if you want to learn linux, go do it in a VM

[Deleted]

you must have trouble reading, i recommended he put OSX back on in the very first reply to the thread

Which is a bad solution because he already said he wants to use Linux, not to mention he already said the performance is superior.

you need to take into account the user getting the best experience from their computer, by recommending linux, on a macbook no less, you are telling the OP to go bang his head against a wall for hours on end and hopelessly search forum threads for support

Actually you'll find that Linux on a Mac is way more viable solution than on a generic off the shelf PC because of a very strict set of components used in them - for example Ubuntu 14.04 or openSUSE 13.1 works straight out of the box on practically all Macs and have excellent performance.

On older Macbooks with 32-bit EFI you can't even use Mavericks without resorting to using 3rd party hacks such as Chameleon/Clover - you're restricted to Lion or lower which are already, from the standpoint of patches, already phased out.

In short; Linux on Mac works great. Also I guarantee I've been doing this far longer than you.

[fixx]

Tinkering with "free" stuff like trying to get linux to run games properly turns into false economy pretty fast. The time spent tinkering to get it work properly is often far less by doing factory restore on the original OS than banging your head on various linux forums. Also when you're talking about game you spend more money per year than buying a bunch of windows licenses the money argument goes out of the window too.

WoW is faster on linux because it simply skips some 3D effects that aren't emulated by Wine yet. Most people don't mnd it because it's not really effects you easily see anyway.

[Cyanotical]

Which is a bad solution because he already said he wants to use Linux, not to mention he already said the performance is superior.


Actually you'll find that Linux on a Mac is way more viable solution than on a generic off the shelf PC because of a very strict set of components used in them - for example Ubuntu 14.04 or openSUSE 13.1 works straight out of the box on practically all Macs and have excellent performance.

On older Macbooks with 32-bit EFI you can't even use Mavericks without resorting to using 3rd party hacks such as Chameleon/Clover - you're restricted to Lion or lower which are already, from the standpoint of patches, already phased out.

In short; Linux on Mac works great. Also I guarantee I've been doing this far longer than you.

telling someone something is a bad idea is not a bad solution, not every question needs to be answered with yes, you wouldn't tell someone to get an AMD cpu with an intel motherboard, even if they wanted to

"runs out of the box" cough*macfanctld doesn't auto install*cough, on top of that, ubuntu is quickly becoming the redheaded step child of linux, and it still sucks as a desktop OS, especially compared to OSX (i use linux 8 hours a day, im more than familiar with it)

Lion still plays wow natively, and has access to the full graphics, linux with wine does not

how long you have been doing this is irrelevant to me, i work in a SOC and deal with arrogant sysadmins all the time, show me proof that the end user will get a better experience running wow on linux on a macbook than they will with OSX

[Ulfhedinn]

Tinkering with "free" stuff like trying to get linux to run games properly turns into false economy pretty fast. The time spent tinkering to get it work properly is often far less by doing factory restore on the original OS than banging your head on various linux forums. Also when you're talking about game you spend more money per year than buying a bunch of windows licenses the money argument goes out of the window too.

WoW is faster on linux because it simply skips some 3D effects that aren't emulated by Wine yet. Most people don't mnd it because it's not really effects you easily see anyway.

Most of the time spent tinkering was me trying to find a way to make OSX work again... Ubuntu was almost to easy... download, place on USB, install ( way faster than windows), copy + paste wow file, downloaded wine (fast again) and that was it really. Took very little time. I am just working on getting the odd effects under control but that is no different then the time I spend every week messing with my UI.

I didn't have SET M2UseShaders "0" in there so checking that out to see if it helps.

[Cyanotical]

what model macbook do you have? there is no reason you should be having trouble installing OSX


heres the list from apple for mavericks compatibility:
To install Mavericks, you need one of these Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or later)
MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or later)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)
Xserve (Early 2009)


i've found the easiest way to do this is to grab a lion ISO off your favorite torrent site, install it, then use it to grab mavericks onto a USB stick and install from there, or you could get a dual layer dvd and just burn the mavericks ISO and raw install it

[Ulfhedinn]

what model macbook do you have? there is no reason you should be having trouble installing OSX


heres the list from apple for mavericks compatibility:
To install Mavericks, you need one of these Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or later)
MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or later)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)
Xserve (Early 2009)


i've found the easiest way to do this is to grab a lion ISO off your favorite torrent site, install it, then use it to grab mavericks onto a USB stick and install from there, or you could get a dual layer dvd and just burn the mavericks ISO and raw install it

http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...olt-specs.html is the exact macbook I have.

The issue comes from when I use internet recovery it pulls a "this file is unavailable" error. From everythign I can find this is caused by a firmware issue a handful of macs have. I spent three days trying to get this to stop but nothing worked. My laptop "should" recover over the internet but refuses.

My original HD seems to be fine still but there is an error in it that prevents booting... In verbose mode you can see the spot it gets suck in. Just loops over and over. The recovery doens't work. The more I test Linux in wow the more I think someone was seriously wrong with my osX install. I am not getting a slight performance improvement... I am getting a HUGE improvement. Higher FPS, less FPS drops, highre settings and it does all that while running cooler.

EDIT:
SET M2UseShaders "0" seems to have solved the issue. Game looks great now.

[Cyanotical]

have you tried wiping and fresh installing? the reason i have experience is upgrading macbooks to SSDs, i just fresh install OSX like any other OS

[Ulfhedinn]

have you tried wiping and fresh installing? the reason i have experience is upgrading macbooks to SSDs, i just fresh install OSX like any other OS

I found a way around my issue and tested the install on USB with my Linux drive in (SSD I stole from my ps3) and install looked like it was going to work fine. So I put my factory drive back in and... Couldn't even load the install from USB. Tried over and over and over and got nothing.

I have checked the drive several times over and even my win7 machine seems to know exactly what is on it but for whatever reason when I put it in my Macbook the computer just fails to do anything correctly. No idea what is up with that drive that makes it impossible to boot from USB by putting it in the computer.. Thinking the drive is got something very wrong with it and going to test it tonight. If WoW runs the way it was on Linux then I know that HD was breaking something.

So I put the SSD back in and tried the install and am now downloading my updates. Computer is working fine now... and yes I tried a full fresh install but could never get the programs to load up to start doing. It would lock up every time. Probably going to toss the drive because I don't want to chance that thing failing on me. Its not like HDs are expensive anymore.