(Warning: Techie-ish Post mostly for the benefit of people who may reach this via Google. Read at your own risk!)

So the Wrath of the Lich King Beta installer worked fine on Wine at the beginning– no issues, nice smooth graphics on the pretty Installer screen… and then I had to read the EULA (where “read” is defined as “hit Page Down twenty times within a span of two seconds”) and hit “I Agree”. Pretty straightforward right?

Well no, because the Installer decided to keep the “I Agree” button grayed out and not let me click it. Bugger.

A quick Google search showed that this was indeed a Wine bug and could be fixed by one of two options; either updating Wine (which in all honesty is itself a bit of a chore simply because I am using an older version of my distro) or doing something crazy and hacky.

Obviously I chose the latter.

This is what I did:

1.) Installed “IEs4Linux”, which sticks a Wine-version of Internet Explorer on your computer. (Yes I installed IE. This is the type of sacrifice I make for this game.)

2.) An attempt to run the installer via IEs4Linux’s Wine told me I needed to have Burning Crusade installed. So, I went over to my Burning Crusade folder, opened the terminal inside the folder, and typed the following:

pikestaff@pintsize:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine wow.exe

Which created the registry files for the original WoW/BC, then I hopped over to the WotLK folder and…

pikestaff@pintsize:~/Desktop/WotLK-Beta-3.0.1-enUS$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine Installer.exe

And I was able to start up the installer, click the “I Agree” button, and…

All set!

Of course, now comes the dreaded patch downloads, and my computer tends to download patches at a horrifically slow rate, so I’m off to bed while it does that. My characters haven’t copied over yet anyway (I am copying both Tawyn, my level 70 Alliance hunter, and Lunapike, my level 68 Horde hunter, to Northrend, the PvE beta server. When I’m all set up you fellow beta-people can say hello!) so, I’m okay with waiting.

I will continue to bring you updates of a Linuxy nature and a huntery nature as they come. I will also continue to bring non-Beta news to those of you who would like to keep WotLK a surprise– in all honesty I don’t plan on spending as much time in Beta as a lot of other people are cause I’d sorta like to be mostly surprised too. I just gotta get in on the new hunteryness for a bit. Anyways, I think I might mark my Beta posts with [WotLK] or [Beta] or something in the title as a spoiler alert.

I figure, lotsa bloggers are showing you the nuts and bolts of Beta, I will give you vintage Pike thoughts on Beta =3