MorrowindOnLinux

UPDATE:

Okay, you know what? This guide has been incomplete for a long time now. And I haven't upgraded my gaming machine because of it. And I'm stuck with an older wine version. But I'm not going to make any progress unless I have some incentive to USE it, so I'm just going to go ahead and upgrade my machine, then think about re-re-installing Morrowind and updating this guide. Then maybe we'll get somewhere.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE:

Well,.... yeah, I got distracted again. Probably works fine in all recent wine versions, try installing PlayOnLinux? through the Software Centre if you want a nice gui to help you, will keep this page around for now because lazy.

Overview

This is a guide I'm writing detailing how to install and play Morrowind on Linux (Specifically, Ubuntu GNU/Linux), using the Wine software compatibility layer.

The basic Morrowind install became much, much easier with Wine version around 0.9.36 - but of course, you should always try to grab the latest version possible.

Practically everything works, including the title screen music and mp3 audio, which was broken for a long time. The important thing is, the game is finally playable out-of-the-box! =D

This Guide

However, merely installing Morrowind isn't enough for me. I also want to describe how to migrate an existing Morrowind install from a windows partition, and there are a number of must-haves to enhance normal Morrowind operation, like Wrye Mash and Morrowind FPS Optimizer. I also need to make sure the Construction Set works fine.

Don't mistake these lengthy instructions for a complicated process! It's not necessarily a difficult task to play Morrowind on Linux - I just want to write a very detailed guide that covers all contingencies.

• Note that I started writing this guide over a year ago. Hey, I'm just lazy like that. This means that software versions and things are a lot newer now. That's probably a good thing. I want to finish writing this guide for the original versions first though, just to make sure everything is consistent. Afterwards, I'll check it works on the latest greatest versions of Wine and Ubuntu.

What you'll need

I'll be using Ubuntu 7.04 for this guide. You'll need a basic working knowledge of it first - how to open a terminal window, run commands, how to navigate your filesystem. If you're not this confident yet, go off and play with it first. Run frozen-bubble from the menu. Then try running it from the terminal. I can't hold your hand through every tiny step, and it'll benefit you to have an understanding of what the steps in my guide are actually doing.

Different people also like doing things differently - I'm sure you have your own preferred layout of your hard drive. For instance, I tend to put large installations of things which are unrelated to the package manager in a directory called /local. Nothing is stopping you installing Morrowind somewhere in your home directory, if that's what you prefer.

If you're already using a different distribution of Linux, that's fine too, of course - some of the steps may be a little different, but no more than the differences between windows xp, windows 2003, or windows vista.

The steps

• First Step: InstallingWine
• One Point Five Step: MakingSomewhereToInstallWineGames
• Second Step:
  • either InstallingMorrowindFromCD
  • or CopyingExistingMorrowindFiles (Unfinished)
• Bonus Step: InstallingWryeMash
• Bonus Step: InstallingMorrowindMods
• Bonus Step: InstallingMorrowindFPSOptimizer (Unfinished)
• Bonus Step: InstallingNifSkope (Unfinished)
• ????
• Profit (Unfinished)

Oh, yeah,

• You may need to enable 3D acceleration somehow. Reasonably easy with nVidia card owners, not so nice for ATI owners for the moment, .. anything else is beyond the scope of this guide. (Maybe I should google up that Envy tool I keep hearing about. Although I hear it's made upgrades more difficult for people later on.)

Current issues

Yeah, it's not perfect yet - my point is that it's playable by Neko Standards™

• Wine 0.9.46:
  • Cell-change loading screens are solid cyan.
  • Pixel shaded water has some odd streaks along the surface.
  • Inventory paper-doll area is rendered solid white.
  • Book text tends to flicker - it gets worse on further pages =( Scrolls seem less affected, though.
  • Some audio such as greetings tends to come out garbled - like there's an echo of the original superimposed on top.
  • TESCS: Clicking to select in the 3D view can be a bit iffy. Double-clicking seems to work without fail, however.
  • Wrye Mash: Can't seem to right-click to open the context menu properly.

See also

• ConfiguringWine?
• WineHQ AppDB entry for Morrowind
• BasicUbuntuResources
• WineResources