LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) in Linux with Wine and LotroLauncher

December 11, 2010 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

Turns out the other game that I play, LOTRO, also works well in Linux. It took a bit of messing around to get setup, but not too much.

I already had the offline installer, 11GB High-Res version, from about 3 months ago when I first started playing.

It was easy to get installed, but then updating was another matter altogether.

Install it with Wine:

wine MirkwoodSetup.exe

Now you need a different Launcher, because the default one doesn’t play nice with Linux. You can grab the GUI version and the bash version from here:

http://www.bmx-chemnitz.de/~mfr/LOTRO/

Make it executable, then put the command line version in:

chmod +x lotrolauncher.script
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Turbine/The\ Lord\ of\ the\ Rings\ Online/

Fire it up using:

~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Turbine/The\ Lord\ of\ the\ Rings\ Online/lotrolauncher.script

It’ll ask you if you wanna update, you do, and it’ll crash. Bugger. Time to fire up Winetricks:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

Grab winetricks and then we need a couple of files to get it running properly:

winetricks vcrun2003 vcrun2005

Great, fire it up again, and hopefully this time you can patch LOTRO!

Once it’s successfully patched, I had to use the GUI launcher to get it to start, but after that it was all good. Performance was poor, but still playable 🙂

Apparently you can run into other issues if using 64-bit Gentoo, but I had no issues. Still, I’ll link to the wine appdb page: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=21337

This may also be of use: http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/LOTRO_under_Linux_and_Mac_OS/X

And lastly, this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=386480

Gentoo, Linux, Lord of the Rings Online, Lotro, Lotrolauncher,