Install and run World of Warcraft on Linux

Installation
Fortunately this is the shorted and easiest part.
Once the first CD is inserted navigate inside it with your favorite File Manager (in most of the recent Linux distribution it should happen automatically) and locate the file called “Installer.exe”. With the most recent versions of Wine (since 0.9.60 if I remember correctly) you should be able to double-click it as you do with any openable file and the installer should start; if it does not, try to right-click it and check if there is an option to open it with Wine. Eventually you can open a console, go the relative directory, and enter:
wine Installer.exe
From here the various windows are identical to the installation process you had in Windows.
In Kubuntu the window that show the “Terms” actually show a series of squares instead of the text; this is due to a missing font, but you can click “Accept” without problems (and WoW will run fine – it seems that the missing font is used just on that particular window).
In most cases you should not have problems when the installer prompts you to change CD. In the unfortunate case that you actually have issues, you have to:

1. abort the installation;
2. create a temporary folder (wherever you want);
3. copy the content of all CDs to that folder;
4. launch the installer from there.

If you made a backup of the patches Blizzard released so far, it is recommended that you install immediately in order to save time later.
Assuming that you have a standard installation of Wine, if you navigate with your File Manager to “/home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/” you fill find several folders with similar names that you find under Windows; if you did not opted to install World of Warcraft to any different folder, you will find it under the sub-folder “Program Files/World of Warcraft/”.
Configuration
In most cases WoW should start out of the box, but there are some tweaks you can do to play more efficently.
First there is a registry tweak to make. Open the “Run” dialog windows of your desktop environment and run “regedit” (without quotes). You should get a program identical to the Windows Registry Editor. Do the following modification:

1. find HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWine;
2. right-click on it and then select [NEW] and then [KEY];
3. call it OpenGL (as it is wrote since the value is case sensitive);
4. right click on the new key and select [NEW] then [String Value];
5. call it DisabledExtensions (again, it is case sensitive);
6. insert GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object as value.

While the recent versions of Wine support DirectX fairly well to run WoW smoothly, some users will find that WoW will run better in OpenGL mode. In order to do that you have to modify the WoW configuration file (Config.wtf); this file is located in the base directory of World of Warcraft (generally under “/home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/”). If you do not find this file you can try to run the game once so it will create the file automatically. Once Config.wtf is open, add the following line (without quotes): “SET gxApi “opengl”.
In most case with this two modification you can run World of Warcraft with good performances.