Install EVE on Linux with Wine

What is Wine?

Wine is free and open source software that allows Linux and other UNIX-like operating system to run windows executables. Wine is compatibility layer (yet another WINE transcript: Wine Is Not an Emulator), it uses native UNIX substitutes for Windows components which results in fast translation from Windows to UNIX 'language', inducing negligible performance loss.

The Wine FAQ on this question.

EVE and Wine

Both EVE and Wine are constantly changing, and this page is not always up to date. As of this writing the Retribution expansion has been tested to work with Wine 1.5.x with minimal work arounds. The current state of compatibility, and help troubleshooting issues can be found on the EVE Online page at winehq. Currently EVE Online is only rated Sliver due to the issues with Captains Quarters.

WineHQ EVE appdb page

Captains Quarters

The Incarna feature of "Walking in Station" does not currently work with any version of wine. It is recommended you disable this feature by hitting esc and disabling “Load Station Environment” under the graphics tab. This feature is not required, and is pointless in the opinion of most EVE players.

Downloading and installing Wine

Most distributions have Wine in their default software repositories. Therefore, you can install Wine with your package manager (Synaptic, yum, apt-get, etc). If you cannot find Wine in your package manger or would like to build Wine from source, you can download and install Wine from the official webpage. You are encouraged to install one of the latest Wine development versions as older ones may be unable to launch EVE at all. Many linux distros provide the lastest wine in alternate software repositories (see winehq link above). In general you should run wine version 1.5.x or newer.

Configuring Wine to work with EVE

In order to run the launcher you will need to install Microsoft Visual C++ runtime. Eve itself also requires also requires thatt you install some fonts. Most people also find they need to install directx libs as well. The easiest way to do this is via winetricks on a terminal/console. "winetricks corefonts d3dx9_36 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010". If you don't have it installed you can download it from the winetricks web site. http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

Note wine version 1.5.20 and newer enables broken d3d11 support. If you are running such versions you will need to disable this support. Run winecfg and select -> Libraries -> [New override for library: ] d3d11 -> Add -> Edit... -> Disable

Due to a bug that crashes EVE when focusing on a different window in older versions of wine, you MAY need to open winecfg (usually found in Applications > Wine > Configure Wine), click on the graphics tab, and click "emulate a virtual desktop". Alternately you can launch EVE via the commandline or a script with wine explorer /desktop=eveA,1920x1080 "c:\program files\ccp\eve\eve.exe". (Replace 1920x1080 with your desired resolution.)

To prevent some graphics glitches (such as all lights becoming black) you may need to turn off HDR and shadows from within Eve's graphics preferences.

If your hardware, or OpenGL driver, is not SM3 capable then you will want to run with lower settings, notably disabling shadows, bloom, and HDR rendering.

Other players have reported performance increases by adding the following to the end of ~/.wine/user.reg

[Software\Wine\Direct3D]

"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
"PixelShaderMode"="enabled"

"VertexShaderMode"="hardware"

Configuring Linux for EVE

In order to run EVE you will need working 3D support. Increasingly this is configured out of the box by most Linux distributions. If this is not true you will need to find the section "Linux video drivers" below. In addition as many Linux desktop environments enable various graphic acceleration features it may be necessary to turn off various 3D features in your desktop settings. Many EVE players running Ubuntu often install KDE, XFCE, or Gnome fallback desktops to avoid the performance hit from running the Unity desktop.

Downloading and installing EVE

Download the Windows client.

Once it is done downloading, double click on the file you downloaded and follow the instructions on screen. The default options in the EVE installer are acceptable.

Patching EVE

Patching EVE should just work via the launcher. Older versions of wine may require the anoying vrun shuffle to patch. This is done by setting msvcr100, msvcr90 , and msvcr80 to via the winecfg program under libraries (native, builtin) for patching and reversing it for playing the game.

Running multiple clients from the same EVE directory

In general running multiple clients just works under wine 1.5 with full screen or windows. In older wine versions you may need to run multiple wine desktops. Example: wine explorer /desktop=eveA,1920x1080 "c:\program files\ccp\eve\eve.exe" wine explorer /desktop=eveB,1920x1080 "c:\program files\ccp\eve\eve.exe" Note that 1920x1080 should be your desired resolution, which should your monitor resolution or smaller.

Downloading, compiling and installing Wine (Alternative)

Wine is one piece of software that is rapidly evolving, therefore it's advantageous to be up-to-date with the latest unstable release. Most major Linux Distros have alternate wine packages provided by 3rd parties. (e.g. WineHQ PPA Repository) Try a google search for "wine your_distro_name latest". For those of us that are not blessed with a repository containing the latest binary builds there is the option of compiling it ourselves.

The Wine project is exceptionally well maintained. Anyone confident at using package managers for adding new software will be able to complete a fresh build of Wine from it's original sources with surprising ease.

• Step one is download the source archive at the bottom of above downloads page.
• Step two is read the short User Guide entry on compiling Wine.
• Step three is use "configure" to identify and your package manager to install all the headers and dev packages that are needed to make Wine compile happily. This is where Wine's polish really shines.

Of particular importance is the OpenGL libs, font libs and screen-mode libs.

The rest is straight forward. Compiling takes some time.

An alternative to compiling is to use precompiled packages of the latest version of wine.

Linux video drivers

To be able to play EVE on Linux, you must have good and working video drivers. Depending of what your video card is, you may need proprietary drivers or open source drivers. This section will also help you to setup the driver you need for your Linux distribution.

Intel

For the most part Intel video chipsets should just work with most major Linux distros. Performance is not great and it's recommended that you should use low settings video settings.

Nvidia

It is the opinion of many that no current Open Source drivers are able to effectively run EVE for Nvidia chipsets. Nvidia provides robust binary only drivers with good performance for Linux. These drivers may come with your linux installation, but in many cases they may need to be actived or installed. If you version of Linux does not provide drivers for Nvidia chipset or they don't support your video card Nvidia provides drivers on their site. Be warned that while these drivers may be newer and provide better performance/features/stablity you may need to reinstall them when ever you update your kernel.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

The above link also provides FreeBSD drivers.

If you prefer a completely open source driver newer versions of the Nouveau driver is reported to function with EVE. Many more recent versions of Linux may include a version of this drive by default. http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

AMD/ATI

The AMD binary driver is generally considered less robust than the NVIDIA, but the Open Source driver is generally considered more stable. It's possible that your current install of Linux has already configured the OSS driver, and things will just work. So don't try anything below before you have tried EVE with your defaults.

All distribution

First, you need to check if the current installed drivers are the good one. For that, you can simply use the mesa provided tools.

Open a terminal with the emulator of your choice and type this command : glxinfo . After you read the output.

OpenGL renderer string must be Gallium 0.4 on AMD xxxxx. You must have those OpenGL extensions : GL_S3_s3tc, GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc, GL_ARB_shader_texture_lod, GL_ARB_draw_buffers_blend.

If you don't you need to install and/or configure the closed source driver from AMD or the Open Source driver from the community. Your results may vary as some drivers work better on some cards and with some versions of Linux, in addition many users prefer OSS software over closed source solutions, while others prefer the vendors driver.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon

Ubuntu

The latest version of Ubuntu should default to the Radeon which should work for most AMD/ATI cards. Ubuntu should already configured 3d acceleration as the Unity interface requires it. Worst case your card is not supported and are doing software rendering which is likely to be very slow if it works at all. Luckily there is also the robust Ubuntu community support as well as the AMD authored driver.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Proprietary Radeon drivers, fglrx, from AMD should be available for the latest cards and are either loaded through Systems Settings -> Additional Drivers or manually following these instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

Arch

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI