Run City of Heroes using Wine!

Wine is a software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows.

This guides purpose is to give a simple and free route for a computer user to get City of Heroes running on Ubuntu Linux.

1. Install the base Linux operating system. Our example will use Ubuntu.

You can find an official install guide for Ubuntu here.

2. Install the restricted drivers (proprietary) for your video card.

In Ubuntu 7.10 it's as easy as enabling them in System > Administration > Restricted Driver Manager.

After the install you will need to restart Ubuntu for the restricted drivers to start.

3. Install Wine on you system.

You can install it using the Synaptic package manager but I found I received the best results by running the most up to date version of Wine.

You can add the repositories to get the most bleeding edge version of WINE by following the instructions here.

The instructions do involve using the terminal but it is all easy cut and paste work.

4. Install City of Heroes.

The easiest way is to simply put your City of Heroes CD in and in the CD right click on Setup.exe > Open with other Application > Wine Windows Emulator.

Follow the install directions as normal and updates as normal.

5. After installing and before playing City of Heroes for the first there are a few things you will want to do.

a. Ensure your visual effects are set to "none". System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.

b. Currently the settings in City of Heroes won't manage your graphics card Antialiasing.

If you have an Nvidia card it's easy to adjust this. Simply type nvidia-settings in a terminal window and the Nvidia settings manager will open.

Go to Antialiasing Settings and adjust it to override application settings accordingly.

c. Desktop Icon. If City of Heroes did not add a desktop icon for you, right click on the desktop and click create launcher.

The command used should look something like: "/home/yourhomefolder/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/City of Heroes/CohUpdater.exe" With you home folder used and including the quotations.

6. Launch City of Heroes.

The first difference noticeable is the ugly mouse cursor. Thankfully it still works great.

To adjust the graphics I found it was best to use the advance mode in options.

Otherwise, you should be ready to play. For more information I suggest reading other City of Heroes players experience with Wine/Linux at Wine HQ.

My system is an Inspiron 9300 with 2GHz CPU, 1GB DDR2 RAM, Geforce 6800 Go GPU running Ubuntu 7.10 and Wine 0.9.50 Screen shots: