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!
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
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.
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?
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.
Hey.
Thanks!! The game is running just fine, but, i cant get the audio to work.. Any tips?
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
This was probably the ONLY thing keeping XP on my dual boot system…now I’m running 100% Ubuntu and can STILL play Starcraft! Cool!
You don’t have to go into command mode if you do the default install of Starcraft. I just go to Applications >> Wine >> Programs >> Starcraft then click the program icon, wine loads it by default.
im having problems loading battle.net… i keep getting an error where it says that the version of starcraft can not be recognized…any thoughts?
I’m having the same problem with battlenet, I thought it might me a key code thing because I’ve had trouble with this key code before.
i am having the same problem of starcraft not being recognized by bnet, any ideas?
Ok… life just got better! Thanks for the instructions Josh!