Quick Starcraft-Linux Tips

There are several nice How-To's out there for installing/running Starcraft with Linux.
This page is being put up to contribute to their efforts.

Update 08/22/02: J. Christopher Pereira is working on some patches to improve compatibility
w/ wine. Check 'em out at SourceForge here.

And now down to the nitty-gritty:
Distro/setup I used: Mandrake 7.1 running on IBM P133 mhz 48 meg ram MGA 2064W
[Millennium] graphics card + version of wine that came on the Mandrake CDRom:
wine-20000326-3mdk.

Following instructions from various sites, I added the /Start Menu/Programs/Starcraft
subdirectories to /var/lib/wine/windows. I used KDE's kfm to get the space between
"Start" and "Menu".

Next I logged in as root and changed the file /root/.wine/user.reg by removing the last
line that begins with "Desktop" and added this line:

Programs=1,0,C:\\WINDOWS\\Start Menu\\Programs
in the same tab position.

An example of my user.reg file can be found here.

THE TEST:

I put the Starcraft cd in and issued the following commands:

shell> mount /mnt/cdrom

shell> cd /mnt/cdrom

shell> wine install.exe

The installation began smoothly and appeared to be 3/4 finished when I got
the following error:

Unable to create a link to C:\Program Files\Starcraft\Starcraft.exe as C:\WINDOWS\
Start Menu\Programs\Starcraft\Starcraft.lnk

I cancelled the installation.

WHAT I DID AFTER A BOTCHED INSTALL:

shell> ps -aux [to reveal stale wine processes (no cheese here!)]

I kill -9'ed these processes w/

shell> kill -9 pid (the number associated with the process)

And after getting a wineserver error upon the next install attempt, the solution was to go into
/root/.wine/wineserver* and delete the "socket" with:

shell> cd /root/.wine/wineserver*

shell> rm socket

After numerous install attempts I went back online and re-read this section
from: Linux Games - StarCraft Under Wine HOWTO:

"If it complains that it can't create a Starcraft.lnk (or similar)
file you can probably ignore it because you should have a working
StarCraft installation by this point and you can terminate the
installation program."

The reality of the section finally hit home but the question was, "How do I terminate the
installation without having it back out of all the files that had been installed?"

My solution (maybe not the most graceful, but effective) was at the point in the
installation where the lnk error occurred, was to hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to break out
of the x server. This may not be the best method and I suggest that you try it only
at your own risk.

If you cd to /var/lib/wine/Program Files/Starcraft you should see the Starcraft files
if the install was successful.

Playing the Game ("Go Go Go!"):

Need to boot into runlevel 3 (text only)
login (as root) and issue the command:

shell> startx -- -bpp 8

(This starts the x server in 256 color mode-- must be in 256 color mode or Starcraft
will give an error and won't start).

After x has started and you're now in KDE/Gnome/your favorite window manager, open up an x terminal and type:

shell> cd /var/lib/wine/Program*
shell> cd Starcraft
shell> wine StarCraft.exe **But before you hit the ENTER key, toggle into 640x480 mode by
pressing CTRL+ALT+KEYPAD-MINUS-SIGN (otherwise Starcraft will not be full-screen).**

This switches video modes in XFree86. In case that key sequence was not clear, you hold the CTRL key
followed by the ALT key followed by the "-" sign on the numeric keypad.

Finally, press ENTER, and hopefully watch Starcraft start and maybe make an adjustment with H-Size or H-POS knobs.

other sources:
http://www.linuxgames.com/starcraft.php3
http://koti.mbnet.fi/~hoppq/sc-howto.html
A mail thread found through Google (google.com)
Patches for Starcraft-wine (thanks to J. Christopher Pereira).

J.M. 02/22/02
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