How do I install and run Lord of the Rings Online on a 64-bit Ubuntu system?

Question

Has anyone found the secrets to installing and running Lord of the Rings Online on an Ubuntu 11.10 64Bit system?

Solution 1

From http://www.lotrolinux.com/

The actual game works very well under wine, with just a few adjustments needed to wine's registry and the games UserPreferences.ini file. Details of these adjustments can be found at the wine AppDB page for the Lord of the Rings Online or the How-To on this site.

Important section from the 2nd link:

Requirements

1. A PC with at least the minimum system specs for the game.
2. Wine or CrossOver Games.

Caveats

You'll need to install the Mozilla engine in Wine to get Help/Lorebook and Turbine Store links to work. If your client crashes or shows a black page when accessing the store, you're missing the Mozilla web browsing engine in Wine If you run Linux and you run Beryl/Compiz (or some other 3D Desktop Effects software), disable them before launching LOTRO. The game will run normally, although with somewhat degraded performance. However, many hotkey functions and mouse gestures used in the game will also activate 3D Desktop effects, and could cause the game to crash. If you get odd texture tiling on the ground, disable Anisotropic texture filtering in the LotRO Advanced Graphics settings.

Download

A client can be downloaded from this link.

Note that it is strongly recommended that you use the standard Turbine Client download (Pando Media Booster, PMB) when installing under WINE 1.3.9 or later. Using Wine versions LOWER than 1.3.9 is NOT recommended.

Installing LOTRO

Install LOTRO. DO NOT USE THE MOM DVD FOR THIS! Install a downloaded version. Patching from the MOM [Mines of Moria] DVD will take as long, if not longer than downloading the current installer and patching it. Also, it is no longer possible to "patch-up" from the SOA [Shadows of Angmar] DVD. Download and install PyLOTRO by following the instructions from the PyLOTRO download page.

Configure the PyLOTRO launcher. The settings should be adjusted to fit your system:

Application      Wine
WINEDEBUG        fixme-all
WINEPREFIX       /home/your-username/.wine
Game Directory   /home/your-username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine/The Lord of the Rings Online
Hi-Res Graphics  Enabled (or Disabled if you downloaded standard res LOTRO) 

Running LOTRO

The first time you run LOTRO it will fail, because it's missing its config files. During the crash it will create them however. From then on it will work fine. If you use the GUI launcher please remember to patch when needed (Tools->Patch->Apply, close when done).

Solution 2

This question seems outdated however since OP specifically mentions Ubuntu 64-bit I suspect it may concern both older and current (13.04) versions of Ubuntu, specifically the 64-bit edition which does not contain the same packages. It is very hard to find the answer, with nearly all advice/tutorials online coming from users of a 32 bit Linux OS.

The Problem

All the guides I found simply mention installing pylotro, and otherwise focus on WineHQ settings. Installation is simply a matter of downloading LOTRO (you can probably download it via Steam under Wine), and creating a Wine prefix to run the installer.

However on Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit (and possibly older 64 bit versions of Ubuntu), the main issue is that you simply can't launch the game with pylotro:

[E08] Server not found - may be down (400)

(for some reason, on Ubuntu 64-bit the SOAP message sent to the server by pylotro receives a HTTP 400 Bad Request response, and the XML is empty)

Install pylotro

The Ubuntu PPA is not available. You can install the Python script from source (article)

$ wget https://sites.google.com/site/leeslinuxblog/PyLotRO-0.1.15.zip
$ unzip PyLotRO-0.1.15.zip;cd PyLotRO
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ su -c “python setup.py install”

Patch pylotro

Now apply the special chars and ssl patch to pylotro. The patch is fairly small, so you can do it by hand, it require editing only two files. You will probably need to change permissions first (double check first your PyLotROLauncher is in the same location):

$ sudo chmod 777 /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyLotROLauncher/*.py

Then just open the following files in a text editor and apply the changes you see on the patch linked above. Be very careful to use the same TABS indentation when you copy the new lines. Use TABS, not spaces. Start pylotro from Terminal after the changes so you will see an error in case you didn't edit the changes properly.

$ gedit /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyLotROLauncher/MainWindow.py
$ gedit /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyLotROLauncher/PyLotROUtils.py

Results

After the patch is correctly applied, the launcher gets past the E08 error. You may see an error about the keyring (another problem with Wine on Ubuntu 13.04 64 Bit), but this doesn't prevent from launching the game.

For me, the following prefix launched the game just fine on the first try, once pylotrowas patched, on Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit:

$ export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_lotro
$ export WINEARCH=win32
$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_lotro winecfg
$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_lotro winetricks d3dx9 vcrun2008 vcrun2005

Of course don't forget to go in pylotro > Options and set the following options to the appropriate directories (below is just an example, with a LOTRO folder copied over from a working LOTRO install in Windows, into the wine "prefix"):

Application        Wine
WINEPREFIX         /home/fab/.wine_lotro
Game Directory     /home/fab/.wine_lotro/drive_c/games/Lord of the Rings Online
Hi-Res Graphics    Enabled
Advanced Options   (unchecked)

Solution 3

For both these games to run you need to install wine(or crossover but i prefer wine)
For lotro - lotrolinux.com
for DDO see these WineHQ-Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited,
DDO, Linux a Howto guide.

Comments

[Admin]

It is better to ask 1 question per topic. The D&D Dragons online needs another question ;)

[Jason Southwell]

It would be advisable to include some more information that just an unformatted link and two links that could be anything (1 and 2 is not very useful).

[Alex]

how on earth am i suppose to install the pylotro ppa if it doesnt tell you how. i got the ppa, but was is the name of the program so i can make "sudo apt-get install ????"

[Rinzwind]

@alex it is a WINE installer so it it installed in there and not in Linux. So -no- apt-get install. You download a zip(and not a debian install file!) file.

[Bleep Bloop]

If someone knows how to apply the .patch file feel free to edit and simplify the answer. The .patch file is downloaded from chakra-linux.org/ccr/…