Guide to running CoX in Ubuntu

Here's a rough guide to running CoX in the Jaunty Ubuntu Distro of Linux.

First, the caveat: Your results may vary depending on your hardware configuration and if you're running different distros you might get a variance.

In Jaunty I found it incredibly easy to get CoH running from scratch.

First open your Synaptic Package Manager and search for "WINE" (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and install it and any necessary dependencies. This is pretty automated - but if you have troubles you can always get Wine from www.winehq.com

You'll notice in your Applications Menu you now have Wine - nothing much in there except for Notepad.

Once Wine is installed download the City of Heroes game from your account management page - remember to get the right version for you, depending on locale. You'll get the Exe file (I saved to my desktop) and simply run it as you would in Windows.

Locate your relevant CoHUpdater and open it as you would normally do in Windows and you're away!

A word of warning re sound: I have had no problems with CoH sound but I've made sure I've used all Pulse Audio and removed Alsa totally. Not everyone recommends this althought Ubuntu is moving to Pulse. There are various schools of thought on that so you may find your sound to be less responsive. Personally I would recommend going one route or the other, Pulse OR Alsa - and removing the one you're not using but be aware if you're using different versions of Ubuntu (Heron for example) you may find sound is a bit flaky.

Happy gaming

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Neat!

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 myself recently (newbie linuxer) and I have been smoothly using Wine with some work related applications. I was wondering if it would be easy to run CoX under Wine, and it seems easy based on your guide. I have a few newbie questions though.

1) Using the updater to install the game under Wine as you do, do you need to download the entire client to the Wine “fake” C:\ partition? Or can you just copy & paste the CoX folder from a Windows installation to the Wine “fake” C:\ partition and then tell the updater which folder CoX is it?

2) I am in Windows now, so I can’t check… When talking about audio, you say you use Pulse Audio instead of Alsa, are they Wine config options or Ubuntu preferences?

Thanks in advance!

@Arda

why use WINE when paying for Cedega helps out Linux support for the game? (remember, Cedega is why there's a Mac Client)

http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-6/C...oH-Cedega.html
http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-6/C...-settings.html
http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-6/C...i/coh-ati.html

je_saist, the installation in Cedega seems a bit tricky, and costs 25€ every 6 months and gives no support to ATI cards, I am right?

Not criticizing, just asking.

@Arda

QR:

The CoH updater aborts when it hits "geom.pigg" and won't go any further. Any idea what I may have done wrong? Wine is installed and I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 on a fresh install. Is there something I should have done with the drive partitions, maybe?

How many people read the title to this guide, and thought it was a guide about running CoH in some odd African language? You might want to mention in the title that it relates to Linux. Those of us who don't do Linux have probably never heard of "Ubuntu."

According to WineHQ's entry for City of Heroes, 'Nothing' is currently working. Everyone seems to be hard up against one intractable error or another. So if you're still playing you're in rare company.

After swearing at it all day I've managed to get it to checksum - twice. But then it gets as far as requesting the patch and horks. I could drop back into Windows and update and then try running it with '-project coh' and skip the patch, but at that point I might as well play it under Windows.

Just a quick thankyou for this guide and to re-iterate problems I had...

I cheated and took a pen drive of my Windows CoH folder and dropped it into .wine/c_drive/Program Files and had all sorts of permissions errors trying to get cohupdater to run. chmod didn't work although I'm not 100% sure I was doing it right.

In the end I made a Games directory under /home/username and dropped it in there.

- renamed the folder to backup
- ran the updater and changed the default location to /home/username/Games.
- Let it install for a second or two, then quit the installer
- Delete the contents of the newly created City Of Heroes folder in Games, and moved the contents of backup into City Of Heroes
- ran the updater.

It did a Checksum, then it hung. I quit, re-ran the updater and on the second attempt, the game loaded fine. Then crashed as I went straight to the tailor with the logged on toon Need to digest Leandro's post above probably...

Not sure if any of these will help anyone else. I'm just getting started with Linux so this is all a bit new.

PS. This guide was tough to find...! Ended up getting here through Google-fu rather than the Guide to Guides. It must be buried somewhere!

-H

Don't know if anyone is still having issues getting passed geom.pigg in the CoHUpdater.exe running with Wine,
but I have solved it (on my end) ...

Terminal :
sudo su
(enter password)
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
4096 87380 524288
(was mine)

at this point, I doubled the middle value.
echo 4096 116760 524288 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem

This should work.
NOTE: Do NOT exit terminal as CoH is updating/fixing files.
Sometimes that tends to reset the values to the defaults,
which you can change if you know how to access the TCP Conf file through Terminal.

Hope that helps.

I copied the piggs folder en masse from another computer. With the new patch, it got past checksumming and updating just fine, but it still freezes on the Loading bar, with "poll_schedule_timeout" displayed in system monitor. The program enters sleep and never comes back out.

When trying to run the game I get the following errors:

fixme:wgl:X11DRV_wglGetPixelFormatAttribivARB unsupported 2009 WGL Attribute
fixme:wgl:X11DRV_wglGetPixelFormatAttribivARB unsupported 2006 WGL Attribute
fixme:wgl:X11DRV_wglGetPixelFormatAttribivARB unsupported 2008 WGL Attribute

fglrxinfo:
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
OpenGL version string: 3.3.10834 Compatibility Profile Context



I used this command in terminal to run CoH:
wine ./cityofheroes.exe -project "coh" -renderthread 0

I finally got the game to run but then, after loggin in, there is only one server:
Select a server
°°° unnamed

After clicking on it I get:
Can't connect to DB server

To install CoH I used this:
http://www.carnildo.com/cohlaunch/index.html
The normal patcher did not work
I then copied the files to a fresh wineprefix


/edit
I found someone who had a simular problem: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=8354
Seems to be a driver related problem. These Nvidia drivers are a major pain in the butt. I cannot tell how often I have had problems with this so far.

/edit again
Catalyst version 11.6
Driver packaging version 8.861-110524a-120881C-ATI
2D Driver version 8.86.5
Catalyst control center 2.13
RandR version 1.3

Using the following command I managed to get past server select:
wine ./cityofheroes.exe -project "coh" -renderthread 0 -auth 64.25.36.4

However, there are still some problems: The game 'lags'. There is a communication problem.
Here are some terminal messages: