Lord of the Rings Online - Free to play!

So today is the big day, unfortunately yesterday was barely a day to me but today is great! Remember my post a few days ago at this point? Yeah it came true at long last. As the title says, Lord of the Rings Online has finally gone free to play.

What this means for us Linux folks is that we now have an MMORPG that doesn't stink on ice free and usable in Wine quite nicely. I'll give you folks a quick run down of how to get it working properly.

First off you will need to make sure you have glx support on your system. Open up a terminal and type "glxinfo | grep rendering" press enter. You should be seeing "direct rendering: Yes" if you see nothing or a No instead you need to install the proper GLX drivers. Look to the upper right hand portion of this blog for the drivers if you're using an nvidia card or AMD/ATI card. Installing those should set you up with direct rendering no problem.

Secondly, get yourself a bottle of Wine. This involves going to WineHQ and going to the download section and following their instructions on getting Wine for whichever distribution you are using. I'd offer screenshots of what you need to do, but the download page at the WineHQ site does quite sufficiently for that.

Thirdly you'll want to trick out Wine with Winetricks. Open up another terminal screen and go to a folder you use for downloading various programs (I like ~/Downloads personally) and type the following into the prompt:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks 

This will download Winetricks to the directory you're currently inside of in the terminal. The download shouldn't take long and once it's complete you need to install a couple of tricks for your install of Wine. Installing these tricks is as simple as typing :

sh winetricks vcrun2005 vcrun2005sp1 d3dx9 d3dx10

What this command will do for you is install the Visual C++ 2005 libraries, DirectX 9 and the DirectX 10  libraries. This enables you to play games with DirectX 9 and 10 graphics which Lord of the Rings Online is a game that uses DirectX 9 at minimum.

After you get the tricks downloaded and it sets them up its time to install Lord of the Rings Online. If you happen to have the DVD's on hand then you are lucky enough to be able to do this with Wine. If however you need to use the download launcher from turbine this part requires an install of Windows. If you don't have the install DVD's go ahead and head to Lotro Download and select which version you want to install on Windows. What you'll need to do is download the whole thing on your Windows machine/install and copy the folder over to your Linux box once its done. If you dual boot Linux and Windows this is easily handled because you can just direct the launcher to the install directory on your Windows partition.

UPDATE: I just found a site that provides a link to the full client for Lord of the Rings Online which can be installed from within Linux. Head on over to LotRO: SoA & MoM client and download the file, its approx 9.2 GB but it should get you going rather than using a Windows install. Thanks go out to ajackson on the Ubuntu Forums and his work on PyLotro. This download will need to be patched significantly once downloaded.

While Lord of the Rings Online is downloading you'll want to do yourself a favor and create an account.  This should be able to be done from within the launcher itself. If not please respond and I'll find the proper solution for you. 

So now you've installed Wine, Winetricks, Lord of the Rings Online and you've created an account. You are almost done w/ this crazy guide wrote by a mad man. The last step left to getting Lord of the Rings Online working on your Linux box is to install a working launcher for Linux called PyLotro. Head to Lotro Linux and go to the download page there. Once there follow the instructions based on your distribution, if you are on a Debian based install it gives a pretty good amount of detail. If you are not on Debian you may have to get the source and compile it but being the lazy gamer I am, I would recommend you get the standalone version. This is a .exe file which is a Windows file so it works from within Wine. I had to use this for a while because of a weird problem on my system installing the PyLotro launcher from the repositories. 

Once PyLotro is installed you'll need to set it up to read your install directory for Lord of the Rings Online and doing that is quite simple. Select "Tools > Settings Wizard" from the menu up top. This will let you find the install of Lord of the Rings Online automatically, however I'm not sure it'll work if you installed it within Windows.  Go ahead and select Wine and Lord of the Rings Online like below and then press Find Games. If it found your install, select the install and press Apply then follow along below.

If this works for you, great it made the next step easier. If this did not work for you, you'll need to enter some information manually in the next screen. Close that screen and select "Tools > Options" which will open up another window. From within this options window there are a few things to enter. Here's what mine looks like.

In the WINEDEBUG section enter "fixmeWINEPREFIX section enter your Wine install directory. Typically the Wine install by default is "/home/user-name/.wine" for example my name is James so it shows "/home/james/.wine". The next section is the most important, if your install was detected in the previous window it should be filled out already for you. If its not filled out or is filled out improperly you'll want to select the "..." button and navigate through your drive to the install directory. Once you find the install directory press Open. The Hi-Res Graphics section is based on which version of the installer you selected earlier, if you selected Standard select "Disabled" otherwise select "Enabled".  Press Save and you'll be back at the main PyLotro screen.

One last step I forgot to mention is to go to "Tools > Patch" in PyLotro  on the new window press Start and let it do what it wants. The patch process will most likely take a while unless you already did this at some point in the past either on a Windows install or a previous Linux install. 

That's it for setting the game up. Now all you need to do is select your realm and then enter your account name and password you made earlier. Press Login and you should be in the game. It might crash on the initial loading because it is creating the config files necessary for it don't be alarmed. If it does crash just open PyLotro again and give it a whirl. Hopefully all goes off without a hitch.

Good Luck and I hope you enjoy.