Linux

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Contents

Introduction

This page is intended for people that want to multibox in Linux. However, this page is not focussed on getting WoW to run in Linux. It might cover some aspects of that, but it will mainly focus on multiboxing. WoWWiki has more information about installing WoW in Linux.

Installing multiple clients

Introducing symbolic linking

Symbolic linking is like placing a shortcut, but more 'deeply'. You can work with the link of that folder as if such folder is actually embedded in the root folder where the link is placed. This way you can have 1 folder with your WoW data and link to it from all your clients' WoW root folders.
in practice you could be working in /home/user/folder, while you're actually working in /otherlocation, because /folder links to /otherlocation. You can see that a directory is symbolically linked by typing "ls -ll".

Why symbolic linking?

Setting up 3 or more accounts can consume a lot of disk space. This would also mean that you will spend a lot of time updating them. Or rather: updating 1 of them and copying it 4 times. This is still a big task, that's why you could choose for symbolic linking.
Symbolic linking allows each WoW installation to start up with its own preferences(config.wtf), but allows you to have their data shared so the WoW clients take less disk space in total. Sharing data on 1 disk for multiple accounts might cause a performance decrease, so you might want to have 1 copy of your data for your main account and 1 copy of your data for all your additional accounts together. It usually isn't a big problem when these additional accounts load slightly slower, since you mostly work with your main account. A USB 2.0 harddisk works fine as storage for your additional accounts' data.
Symbolic linking also has the advantage of having all your accounts' settings on 1 location, which makes it easy to make a backup.

A practical example

Consider these folders:

/home/user/WoW/Data
/home/user/WoW/Interface
/home/user/WoW/WTF/Accounts

Everything in /home/user/WoW except for the above folders is what you will copy into your 4 additional WoW folders. For each of the folders mentioned above, you will link through 1 'virtual' folder that contains the data of these folders.

The result will be something like: 

/home/user/WoWMultiBox1/Data -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Data
/home/user/WoWMultiBox1/Interface -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Interface
/home/user/WoWMultiBox1/WTF/Accounts -> /home/user/SharedWoW/WTF/Accounts

/home/user/WoWMultiBox2/Data -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Data
/home/user/WoWMultiBox2/Interface -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Interface
/home/user/WoWMultiBox2/WTF/Accounts -> /home/user/SharedWoW/WTF/Accounts

/home/user/WoWMultiBox3/Data -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Data
/home/user/WoWMultiBox3/Interface -> /home/user/SharedWoW/Interface
/home/user/WoWMultiBox3/WTF/Accounts -> /home/user/SharedWoW/WTF/Accounts

and so on ...

All the other data in /WoWMultiBox# will be a regular copy from what's in the normal WoW folders. All the above are the links that you can configure.

Setting it up

  • Make sure you have a backup copy of your original WoW installation folder before following this tutorial.
  • Copy the "Data", "Interface" and "WTF" folders from your original install folder(/home/user/WoW) to another folder. Let's say this will be /home/user/SharedWoW
  • Copy all the other files from /home/user/WoW to /home/user/WoWMultiBox1
  • Create the symbolic links in /home/user/WoWMultiBox1:
    • Open a console and go to /home/user/WoWMultiBox1
    • Type in: ln -s ../SharedWoW/Data ./Data
    • Type in: ln -s ../SharedWoW/Interface ./Interface
    • Type in: ln -s ../../SharedWoW/Interface ./Interface
    • Copy /home/user/WoW/WTF/config.wtf to /home/user/SharedWoW/WTF
    • In the console, go to: /home/user/WoW/WTF
    • Type in: ln -s ../../SharedWoW/WTF/Accounts ./Accounts
  • Copy /home/user/WoWMultiBox1 to /home/user/WoWMultiBox2, /home/user/WoWMultiBox3 and so on.


You now have all your WoW data assets in 1 folder!
Each WoWMultiBox directory will now be less than 50MB if you don't have any screenshots saved. Alternatively, you might want to link the screenshot folder too.

Updating WoW for symbolically linked setups

The best way to make sure all remains set up correctly is to first start 1 of the clients and after that you can start the rest of them. If WoW wants to update, then you only update the first client and copy the files in the WoW root folder to all the clients afterwards.

Updating plugins for symbolically linked setups

Just go to your shared interface folder(/home/user/SharedWoW/Interface/AddOns) and install the new plugin. All clients that use this shared directory will automatically have the new plugin installed.

Virtual desktops

If you have a low-end computer, you can put your additional accounts on multiple virtual desktops. Window managers like KDE and Gnome can provide these.
Benefits:

  • Easily switch from your main account to your additional accounts and backward. You can gather all additional accounts on 1 desktop in smaller windows and your main account in 1 big separate window. The lag can 'break' a /follow over a longer walking distance. You can solve this by temporarily move your main window to the virtual desktop with the other windows, so the CPU time gets shared better(but the framerate of your main window will drop). You can use ctrl+alt+[left/right] on an active window to move a window to the nearest virtual desktop.
  • High framerate, because you don't draw the other windows.

But:

  • Keyclone might become bug (see Tools section below on how to resolve this)
  • You will probably encounter a bit of lag on your additional accounts.

Because of this, a relatively old machine(Pentium 4, 2.8GHz, 3GB RAM, GeForce 7900GS) can run 4 accounts at the same time. Although there are some frame drops from 10-20fps in Orgrimmar or other crowded places.

Tools

Useful Linux tools include:

  • Keyclone for replicating keystrokes locally.
    • This will require Wine.
    • You can use apt-get to install Wine or you can get it at http://www.winehq.org/
    • A known issue is that this application sometimes keeps pressing 'shift' for you while you don't press it. This happens when you do ctrl+shift+arrow to change to a different virtual desktop. Switching to and from an alternative application on that same desktop solves it. You can do this by pressing alt+tab twice.
    • If placing a shortcut on your desktop doesn't work, you have to right-click the shortcut, click on "Properties" and set the correct permissions.
  • Synergy2 for replicating keystrokes and mouse input over a network.
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