I'm Back

I've returned to World of Warcraft.  A friend sent me a Scroll of Resurrection, and a free upgrade to Cataclysm is pretty hard to pass up.

The state of WoW in Wine is not at its best.  Debian (and Ubuntu) are stuck in v1.5.5, which unfortunately runs WoW as garbage.  The last previous version that looks good is 1.5.2, which you would have to compile from source.  Apparently, Scott Ritchie, the Ubuntu PPA maintainer, is waiting for Kai Wasserbäch, the Debian maintainer, to upgrade.

Currently, your best bet is probably openSUSE 12.1 or SalixOS 13.37 (or its Slackware base, if you're that hardcore).  Right now for me, it's a 32-bit openSUSE 12.1 netinstall with LXDE, Wine 1.5.6, and ATI's Catalyst driver.  I'm now running on an AMD Socket 939 dual-core 2GHz 64 bit processor (now dual-core), 3 GB of RAM, the same ABIT KN8 Ultra v1.1 mobo, and a 512MB ATI Radeon 4670 PICe GPU.  The new client is more graphically demanding, so framerates are a little worse in my tests than my 128MB nVidia 7100 did back in WOTLK.  I'll be reposting my "How to install Linux" guide next.

Even with 3 GB of RAM, swap has become an issue, so I edited /etc/sysctl.conf and added the line vm.swappiness = 100 to the end in order to disable swap. If you worry that you don't have enough RAM to run without swap, either get Conky going and add something like:  ${memgraph 40,150 000000,666666}
and/or:  RAM: $memperc% $mem/$memmax
to your ~/.conkyrc file.  A post on Conky is something else I'm going to have to do.