Case Insensitivity in Windows Strikes Again!

So now that I’m playing World of Warcraft again, I had to go grab the expansion that’s out now (Burning Crusade) to prepare for Wrath of the Lich King that hits in November. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to head over to Windows to install and patch up again since I figured there might be something odd with the installer/patcher and Linux, so I didn’t take any chances.

Grabbed everything, installed, and ran completely successfully in Windows, though its performance made me quickly want to head back over to Linux. Which I did.

Unfortunately, trying to run it in Linux gave me a curious error:

This application has encountered a critical error:

File not found

Program: C:\Program Files\WoW\Wow.exe
File: .\Client.cpp
Line: 2840

file: signaturefile

Apparently a file called signaturefile was nowhere to be found, which was odd, since everything worked fine in Windows. I tried a few combinations (running from a pristine .wine directory, for one) but nothing seemed to work. So I tried running the repair.exe to no real effect, which made me start searching. First thing I found: someone suggested deleting some of the patch pack files in WoW and running repair to allow it to repatch. That sounded quite time-consuming, but was looking like my only hope…

until someone said the answer was actually much simpler. Even though Wine tries its best to be case-insensitive when looking for programs and files, at times it just can’t be as mind-numbingly case-insensitive as Windows because, after all, we are still in a Linux environment which (correctly) requires precise case for a filename. The culprit: the patch.mpq file which holds the data for the patches. WoW was looking for “patch.MPQ”, but the Windows patcher had named it “patch.mpq”. Being on a FAT32 partition, simply renaming the file didn’t work (since, for FAT32, Linux thinks it’s the same file to, again, appease Windows), but moving it elsewhere as patch.MPQ then moving it back worked perfectly.

World of Warcraft ran without a hitch after that, and everything is great again.

Windows, I curse you and your immature file system that lazily does not enforce case sensitivity. Yet another example of why Windows needs to start over a la OSX.

Wine

Wine continues its march toward creating a new Windows platform without having to use Windows itself. With each new version, Wine runs better, is more compatible, and will run new applications and games easier than it had before. While ideally I would like to have Linux applications that I can run natively instead of programs written for another OS, at least I am able to deal with these programs in a controlled environment running on open-source software rather than a Microsoft-controlled closed-source system.

Not to say that I don’t have a Microsoft-controlled closed-source system on my computer to run things Wine can’t quite handle, but I digress.

I’ve recently started playing World of Warcraft again (what can I say, I’m a weak person), and as it has before, Wine easily plays this behemoth of a game flawlessly with a minimum of tweaking, and even runs it better than it runs under my Windows XP install, especially in large populated areas where framerate can at times be a slideshow under Windows. It still struggles with framerate under Wine in these areas, but I attribute that more to my quite ancient computer than anything else.

For some strange reason, I’ve had lockup issues with the native version of Unreal Tournament lately under Linux, so I decided to see how Wine would handle it. At first, all I could get it to do was display the splashscreen, go to a dark fullscreen and then do nothing (getting back to the desktop revealed some sort of exception caused by the sound not working, according to the messages I got back). Finally I fiddled with it long enough to discover that setting Wine to use OSS instead of ALSA under winecfg was enough to get it working flawlessly.

What really makes me marvel is the fact that I can point Wine to a CD-R mountpoint for a drive and use it to run Windows CD burning software under Linux. Generally pointless of course thanks to the amazing k3b, but amazing nonetheless.

Of course, the latest wonder for Windows has to be Google Chrome, but it looked like at first Wine was going to be unable to handle this new browser until Google got around to porting it over to Linux (I’m not holding my breath). But someone found a way with a little tweaking, and Chrome runs just fine under Linux, even running the “about:internets” easter egg if you throw a copy of the Windows 3d pipe screensaver in your Wine virtual C drive. Amazing.

And finally, while I don’t quite have the power to run it, apparently the new game Spore actually works, though with a few graphical glitches, and even these can be taken care of with a patch to Wine.

Thanks to everyone that works to make Wine great. I look forward to every single release knowing that you are working hard to bring more software to those of us running Linux.