As I had  announced some time ago on the forums, the Linux Outlaws community now has their very own Laconica microblogging server. Seeing that most of the bugs are ironed out and the new theme is installed, I also wanted to officially announce it here. If you head over to linuxoutlaws.net, you can create an account and start posting messages. You can also subscribe to contacts on identi.ca or other Laconica-powered microblogging servers and those contacts can subscribe to your account on linuxoutlaws.net. A Twitter bridge is in the works. Pretty nifty, huh?

In this article, I describe how to get Spore running in Linux with a patched and custom-compiled version of Wine. I’ve been enjoying this game quite a lot lately and wanted to share my method for getting it to work on a penguin powered machine. It was a bit of hacking to figure it all out (especially for a compile-n00b like me) but the resulting howto should be easy enough to follow. I hope this helps a few people. We will also talk about this on Episode 54 of the show which should be released in the next few days.

Disclaimer
To get Spore to work in Linux, you currently have to break the game’s DRM because it does not work with Wine using a so called “no-DVD crack”. This may be illegal in your jurisdiction and I cannot accept any responsibility for anyone doing so. As far as I know (and I am certainly no lawyer) it is currently not illegal to do so here in Germany.

Reference System
I used a Dell XPS m1330 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GBs of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card for this howto. The machine is running Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” and I am using the nvidia-glx-new driver provided by Ubuntu.

What to Expect
On the aforementioned system, Spore runs with about 95% quality compared to Windows. Basically, everything works minus the build-in DRM and the most advanced shadow and lighting effects. All the online features seem to work perfectly as far as I can tell. It also probably runs a bit faster than on Windows due to the fact that the OS itself has a lighter overall resource footprint.

Prerequisites
If you currently have any version of Wine installed, uninstall it completely taking care to rename your current .wine folder (i.e. to .wine-old) before you do so.

Having gotten all this out of the way, we get to the meat of it. Here’s what I did to get the game to run in Linux (it should work for you as well although you might need to modify certain things if you are using an ATI/AMD video card or if you’re not on Ubuntu):

1. Make sure you have the following packages installed before you start:
   # aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dev x11proto-gl-dev libasound2-dev
   At least these were the packages I had to install in Hardy to get Wine to compile with OpenGL and ALSA support (crucial if you want to get the game to run at all and with sound as well).
2. Grab the latest Wine source (1.1.4, at the time of writing) from the official download site
3. Extract the source tarball to its own directory, cd to that directory
4. Download this patch to the Wine source and rename it to spore.patch
5. cd into the wine-x.x.x subfolder with the actual source
6. Apply the patch by issuing the following command:
   $ patch -p1 < ../spore.patch
7. If the patching was successful, compile and install Wine with the following command:
   $ tools/wineinstall
   Make yourself a sandwich and some coffee, because the compiling may take a while depending on how fast your CPU is (it took roughly 20 minutes on my 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo). When Wine asked me if I wanted to install the compiled version to my system, I answered “yes” and consequently had to enter my root password before the installation stage. If you do not want to install the patched version permanently, answer “no”.
8. Install Spore with the installer from the CD and cancel the DirectX install popup. The install should finish normally. If Wine hangs a bit, leave it to do its thing for a few minutes.
9. Crack Spore’s stupid DRM (see disclaimer up top!).
10. Start the game with the provided Wine launcher or by going to the game’s Sporebin directory and typing $ wine SporeApp.exe in the terminal. Enjoy!

If you follow these steps, it should be pretty straightforward to get the game to run on your system. And don’t be afraid of the patching & compiling, it sounds scarier than it is. I did it all in a coffee shop on a half-full laptop battery. Just make sure you back up all your other Wine games and the whole .wine config folder before you do this…

If you have any questions or run into trouble, please post something in this forum topic and I will try to help you as much as I can. You can also ask me for help in #linuxoutlaws on irc.freenode.net whenever I’m in there.