So I spent all day trying to get Guild Wars working with wine and then cedega . I installed and uninstalled it a whole bunch of times, tried tweaking the settings in both wine and cedega and nothing. I just kept getting a black screen, then my mouse would be trapped and the only way to get out of it would be ctrl-alt backspace.

In the end what worked and I mean just quite simply worked was Play On Linux. I had actually given up on trying to make it work, I downloaded Play on Linux and just wanted to check it out, and was surprised to see guild wars on the list. So I said What the Hell and decided to give it one last try. I clicked the install, and a little window popped up asking me if I had a dvd, I was slightly discouraged as I didn’t I had a CD. So I clicked no then it asked me if I had a cd (ah ha I thought) so I clicked yes. POL then asked me to put CD 1 in the drive, and I did. Then it asked me where the CD was located giving me three options to choose from.

cdrom
cdrom0
other

I chose cdrom0 as that’s where my disk was, and POL proceeded to copy files. Then we went through the same thing with disk 2. After that was done the guild wars installer popped up and POL’s window asked me to click next or ok when the installer asked me for disk 2. When it came to that point and the installer asked me for disk 2, I was slightly confused as the guild wars installer has an “OK” button, which I attempted to click a few times at first but that didn’t work. finally I decided to click the forward button on POL, then the installer happily continued on it’s way to completion. During the final bit of installation I took note of the fact that the POL window told me to close the game to continue once it automatically popped up. (Guild Wars opens Automatically upon install completion). So once the game opened up I had a complete black screen, but due to my previous attempts I had found a forum post at the cedega forums, which said to try pressing ALT+enter to switch to window mode, this worked and I was now able to see the game. So then I closed it and finished the task of deciding whether I wanted Icon’s on my desktop, menu or both (I chose menu only as I like a clean desktop).

Play On Linux was simple and easy, and even gave me a nice update button so I didn’t have to wait for the game to update once it was loaded. I also was able to play in window mode which I like. I spent several hours tonight enjoying myself in Guild Wars!

So that’s my success story for the day I hope this post in the least has entertained you, or at the most enlightened you to a very handy piece of software.

Angel