StarCraft in Ubuntu? YES, Drink the WINE!

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In keeping in step with my new found love of StarCraft, I wanted to play it on my laptop. One problem… my laptop doesn’t run on windows or mac, its powered by UBUNTU!

I love running Ubuntu, and I have never found a reason why I would need windows on my laptop. Ubuntu does everything I need it to, that is until I wanted to play a PC based game on it.

I did a little google searching and I found out that WINE on Ubuntu will play StarCraft perfectly! I gave it a go, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how well it all worked together.

Here are the steps I took:

  • Open a terminal and run sudo apt-get install wine to get wine.
  • After that finishes, insert the StarCraft CD into the computer
  • In the terminal cd to whatever cdrom drive you put the cd in (under the /media/ directory). Mine was /media/cdrom0
  • Use Wine to setup StarCraft with wine setup.exe. You’ll get the install screen for SC - enter your CD key and install the software. StarCraft will be installed under the path of
    ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
  • In the terminal, run winecfg and go to the Audio tab. Set Hardware Acceleration to Emulation.
  • What is StarcCaft without the Broodwar expantion? I eject the Starcraft CD and insert the Broodwar expantion CD.
    cd to the appropriate /media/ directory and run wine setup.exe.
  • To play StarCraft, run wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
    I was also able to find a link to it from the Applications menu in Ubuntu.
  • Lastly, I downloaded the latest patch to BroodWar from blizzard.com, and ran that with no problem.

There it was, a fully patched and running copy of StarCraft on my Ubuntu laptop. Can life get sweeter? I submit that it can not!

5 Responses to “StarCraft in Ubuntu? YES, Drink the WINE!”

  1. Curtis Says:

    Hey Dude, if you seriously want to get into gaming in linux, you gotta check out Transgaming’s Cedega. It used to be called WineX back in the day. Its basically a version of wine that they tweak the hell out of to ensure the most demanded games run in. Its awesome stuff! http://www.cedega.com.

  2. doug Says:

    When you say you installed the latest patch, do you mean the no-cd patch? If so, did you get it to work in wine without the CD?

  3. Josh Highland Says:

    I just went to blizzard.com and downloaded the latest patch for broodwar. I have to have the cd to play the game every time under wine. On my windows machine, I use an ISO file and a virtual drive.

  4. Lars J Says:

    Hey.

    Thanks!! The game is running just fine, but, i cant get the audio to work.. Any tips?

  5. Christopher YM Says:

    There is a way to get the application to run without the CD using wine. It’s described in the gentoo-wiki.com tutorial on setting up wine for use with starcraft. It basically mounts the ISO of the CD.

    http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_StarCraft_with_wine#Alternate_Virtual_CD_method_which_allows_normal_user_to_mount_iso.27s

Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/joshhighland

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