Monday, May 14, 2012

HOWTO: Diablo 3 on Linux

Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard's soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.

Want to know the reason I am such a fan of Crossover? A few weekends ago I spent about 6 hours trying to get Wine sources to compile with various patches to make the Diablo 3 open beta work on Linux. The result? I ended up hanging my head in defeat and just playing on my OSx86 system so I didn't miss the weekend event. At that point Diablo 3 didn't work OOTB on default Wine builds or Crossover.

This morning I dropped by #crossover on FreeNode to check in with the Crossover folks to see what their plans were for the Diablo 3 release due out tonight - were us Linux folks going to have to wait?

Nope!

The Diablo 3 release is something they had been very aware of and had been testing rigorously in-house. I was informed they had internal builds of Crossover where Diablo 3 was functional enough to play this very day. In fact within three hours of my speaking with them they had an "unsupported build" release that was functional with the Diablo 3 installer (note: if you are not a current Crossover customer that above link will not work for you).

I promptly installed the update and was on my merry way:


As of now if you are using Crossover 11.1 or newer Diablo 3 is now officially supported,

Now - if you are not interested in supporting Crossover - you can attempt to succeed where I failed and compile Wine with some of the patches listed on the Diablo 3 Beta AppDB page. Odds are if you wait for the next Wine developmental release or two, Diablo 3 will just start working by default - the Crossover folks are one of the lead contributors to the Wine project and most of their code improvements go upstream.

Trouble Shooting Tips:
If you are having issues getting it to run via the latest Wine builds it might be worth your while to use winetricks to install the "vcrun2008" package.

If your login attempt is hanging at the "authenticating credentials" step, exit Diablo, open a terminal and run:

echo 0|sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

~Jeff Hoogland
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

29 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 12:45 AM

    Um it is not working form me D3 is not in the list with either of those un supported builds and the unsupported install wont work

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 6:39 AM

      Are you using Crossover Version 11.0.3-1 from the unsupported builds section? This is needed as I mentioned above in my post to make things work.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 12:37 PM

      Yes, install-crossover-11.0.3rc1.bin I do not see D3 on the list of programs so pick "other applications" It starts the bar going across in a vista or XP bottle but only gets about 1/3 to 40% before crashing with cant uncompress...have 1TB of free space on home so know that is not it. Would love to know what I am doing dif

      Delete
    3. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 12:55 PM

      I simply selected "other applications" as well and used the online downloader. My WineCFG for that bottle has the OS as WinXP and I also appear to have Visual C++ 2008 installed - if you don't have that in your bottle does adding it help?

      Delete
    4. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 3:55 PM

      did as you suggest in an xp bottle, still get "Failed to extract required files from an archive. Please try again"

      Delete
    5. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 4:03 PM

      supposedly there is an unsupported tie I am willing to give it a try in term but cant figuer out how to specify a bottle

      ./cxinstaller --tiefile=~/cxoffice/share/crossover/data/DiabloIII.tie --installersource=/media/D3C1.0.0/ --bottle=BOTTLE

      I think would be the comand if I can figuerout what to put in for "BOTTLE" if you know thanks a million...5 million no 10 if it works

      Delete
    6. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 5:30 PM

      I'm not 100% familiar with the input for that command - I would highly recommended asking in #crossover on freenode or on their user forums - the crossover staff is very responsive.

      Delete
    7. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 9:09 PM

      ummm... finally got the TIE to run but crashed still trying to install

      Delete
    8. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 9:31 PM

      And you are 100% sure you are using the 11.0.3rc build from the unsupported downloads? Beyond that you are using the downloader installer from Battle.net and not the CD installer?

      Delete
    9. AnonymousMay 16, 2012 at 1:34 AM

      I have been trying the DVD do I need to DL from Battle net

      Delete
    10. AnonymousMay 16, 2012 at 1:39 AM

      yes I was using the rc whithc is renamed install-crossover-diablo.bin now and tried uninstall reinstall to that and still wont work right

      Delete
    11. JeffHooglandMay 17, 2012 at 3:22 PM

      Figured it out! I was getting this too after recent server issues Blizzard had. Close diablo and run this in terminal:

      echo 0|sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

      Delete
  2. Drowz0rMay 15, 2012 at 6:00 AM

    Actually, when you log into Cross-Over, it has a "known not to work" status found:

    http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=6277

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 6:40 AM

      Yes - this is true if you are using the latest supported Crossover build - you need to use the latest Unsupported build as I mentioned in the post.

      Delete
    2. Josh DuBoisMay 15, 2012 at 9:51 AM

      Yes, it is true that Diablo III will show up as 'known not to work' on the CodeWeavers applications database. This is because it is not yet running with any of our official, supported builds.

      However, if you click the green button on http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=6277 that says 'Install Diablo III via CrossTie', you will get a CrossTie file which, if you are running the unsupported diablo build referenced above, and have an nvidia card, should work.

      Delete
  3. trishtren18May 15, 2012 at 8:51 AM

    i downloaded the unsupported build but it was a no-go installing from disk. threw a error :/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 9:20 AM

      Register your serial key to your battle.net account (this will need to happen anyways) and then use the downloader installer - worked fine here.

      Delete
    2. trishtren18May 15, 2012 at 7:44 PM

      thanks for the tip. the installer worked and I got it 100% downloaded. It launches and even connects to bnet but then it never gets past authenticating my account. Kinda at a loss here.

      Delete
    3. trishtren18May 15, 2012 at 7:55 PM

      actually seems to be a common issue according to the bnet forums. radeon is causing graphics to look goofy. a lot of red lol.

      Delete
  4. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 9:39 AM

    We have shipped an 11.0.3rc1 build that supports Diablo3. As a customer, it will be on your account My Downloads-->Unsupported Downloads tab-->CrossOver Linux tab. You'll see various unsupported Diablo3 builds there.

    Please note that some ATI cards may have graphical glitches. We're working on that even as we speak. nVidia users should be okay.

    Cheers,

    -jon parshall-
    COO
    www.codeweavers.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 4:04 PM

    jeff, it would be VERY interesting to know some comparisons between running D3 in Linux and Windows. usability, perf etc...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeffHooglandMay 15, 2012 at 5:29 PM

      The only Windows machine in my house is a VM, perhaps I could do a comparison between OSX and Linux though as I do have OSx86 setup on one of my machines.

      Delete
  6. AnonymousMay 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM

    Has anyone seen if this works well.

    http://silentcoder.co.za/2012/05/linuxmint-12-diablo3-mini-howto/

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownMay 16, 2012 at 2:07 AM

    I've got Diablo 3 on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit working. Hope you don't mind the plug: vince-0.blogspot.com/2012/05/diablo-3-on-linux-with-wine.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. Pedro MateusMay 16, 2012 at 6:24 AM

    I got the BETA working on Fuduntu 2012.2 without much trouble.

    ReplyDelete
  9. gekko_chMay 17, 2012 at 1:32 AM

    Hi
    Im running DIII on Fedora with playonlinux and it's working fine.

    Howto:
    1. Get newest Version of playonlinux
    2. choose install
    3. choose games / DIII
    4. Go online and Download the FULL Game Client
    (i wasn't able to install from DVD)
    5. choose the Gameclient as Setup

    Have fun

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousMay 22, 2012 at 2:52 PM

    Our newest version of CrossOver (version 11.1) now fixes the ATI driver issues that used to plague Diablo 3. So it's fully supported at "Silver" level now on our Compatibility Center:

    http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=6277

    Cheers,

    -jon parshall-
    COO
    www.codeweavers.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeffHooglandMay 22, 2012 at 5:54 PM

      Fantastic news! Updated the above post to reflect this information.

      Delete
  11. Scott RobargeMay 23, 2012 at 3:29 AM

    Nice Blog! Thanks for sharing nice information with us.

    Scott Robarge

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)