[caption id=“attachment_1109” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“World of Warcraft”][/caption]

Yes, I’m still alive and kicking. Been really busy at work and haven’t had the time or energy to write anything here. I have however kept my New Year’s resolution of reading a book during lunch break every day! I’m currently reading 2 books at the same time (check what other books I have read and those I have still waiting on my queue in the front page of my blog):

• For The Win by Cory Doctorow
• The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester

I feel that it is impossible to read Doctorow’s book and not feel the urge to play World of Warcraft (WoW). Impossible! I think the last time I played this game I still lived in Northern New Jersey and was an Ubuntu user (yeah, I’ve matured since then).

So I wanted to play WoW really bad after reading a chapter but wasn’t sure how to do it since I only run GNU/Linux and didn’t feel like setting up a Windows VM just to play a game! Talking to my long time friend Vinny I suddenly realized that I never tried to run the game using Wine, so I decided that once I got home I’d take it for a spin.

After downloading a 3.3MB installer from Blizzard, and installing Wine (sudo conary update wine), I went ahead and ran wine TryWoW.exe. What followed was a series of screens where I simply accepted the defaults and clicked my way through. There were times when a dialog with no messages popped up where all you could do was click on the OK button… so I did.

The installation did require access to the internet and a bundle of approximately 35MB was downloaded in the process. Once the wizard finished I had the option to play the game right there and then! How exciting!

The game takes a few extra seconds to start but eventually I was face to face with the login window. However, I noticed that I had no audio and the video quality lacked a bit. Googling around brought me to these instructions. So I modified my configuration file to include:

SET gxApi “opengl” SET Sound_SoundOutputSystem “1” SET Sound_SoundBufferSize “150”

That was it!!! I spent the next 45 minutes playing the game using my trial account and had to be dragged by my wife and kids to the kitchen to eat diner with them! :)

I’m very satisfied with the experience and extremely pleased with the stability of Wine! Since I have 2 monitors at home, my game window shows up in one monitor while my “normal” desktop is on the other and I have to be careful not to click outside of the game. If I do, then I cannot go back into the game again and have to kill the process and start over.

Well, I still have a few more days until my trial period expires. Will I then update to a full blown account and waste spend my free time investing on my character? To be determined! :)