The Second Drawer

I was trying to run Guild Wars under wine last night, without success for a while. I have a number of games that run through wine (WoW, CS, Warcraft III) and couldn’t work out why it would have stopped working. I had some initial success at some points playing around with the settings I could get into the login screen with it rendering terribly slowly, but could never actually start the game.

Eventually I had a thought after digging through a whole stack of posts - that I should check glxinfo. Voila - the key to my demise was there - direct rendering: No. That seemed strange because I have been running wonderland without issue. However I hadn’t tried any of the other games since I upgraded from ubuntu edgy to feisty - but I hadn’t had any luck getting Dawn of War to run.

So then began the search for information about getting direct rendering working with nvidia. I found a post saying that doing a glxinfo | grep vendor all the vendor strings should match. I did this and came up with nvidia for the server glx, but client glx vendor string: SGI. This didn’t make any sense, everything I had pointed to having nvidia-glx-new package from ubuntu correctly installed. In the past I have installed the nvidia binaries direct nvidia (mainly because the edgy driver version was too old). However this was the key - somewhere along the line the links had been screwed up, and debian package manager was being good and not overwriting the settings. Doing an ls -l /usr/lib/libGL* showed me that my libGL.so.1 was a link to /usr/lib/libGL.so.bak, rather than to /usr/lib/libGL.so.9785.

Fixing this link, fixed my problem and guildwars ran without issue (with -nosound … that’ll be the next thing to overcome, but I rarely use sound anyway).