Startrek Online has been out for a while now and I have been thinking of perhaps testing it. I read a bit about in on WineHQ and it seemd that it should run under Wine without to much problems. So i decided to have a go at it.

Downloading the game

I decided to start the thing by trying the Demo game you can donwload and try.

The Demo allows you to create accounts, play through the tutorial mission and the “Stranded in Space” mission. This gives a nice test of the game and I wanted to see that I could run the game before committing and buying the game. I did found out that you cant go to the bridge, fly into any other star system (I wanted to visit Vulcan) so the demo is quite restricted, but works well for a test.

So lets get going. Go to http://startrekonline.com/demo and clikc on the download/Cryptic to get the download program down.

The downloader is some kind of P2P program and will NOT work under wine. It runs for a while but crashes fairly often. So I did end up running the downloader in Virtualbox and there it run nicely.

Make shure you download the game to a shared drive that you can access from both Virtualbox and from linux. This is because when you have downloaded the complete installer, you wil run that from Wine to do the install.

So when the download is complete, exit the installer and Virtualbox.

Installing the game

To install the game run the download/installer from wine when the download is completed.

You need to install some extra parts for Wine before the system and installer will run rightly. If you haven’t downloaded and installed winetricks there are some instructions here.

Then install ie6 from winetricks:

Then its time to do the install. I ran it with the command:

This will start the installer, Select the path where you downloaded the files from within Virtualbox and let it verify the files. Install and register the demo account with cryptic/startrek online.

When you run the game, website you will get some javascript errors, but just click yes to continue run javascript on this page and you should get there.

Fixing the Icon

The installer will create a desktop icon if you allow it, but I changed the command to run as I wanted the game to run in a virtual desktop and be able to run the game fullscreen in this. So I changed the Application:Command to be:

There are a couple of things you need to fox to get the game to run well

Fixing the sound problem

Out of the box the sound will not work correctly. At least not for me. So to fox that you need to do the following:

• Startup winecfg
• Click on the “libraries” tab
• Under where it says “New override for library” enter mmdevapi then click add
• Select it on the list, click edit, select disable, and click ok.
• Click on the main OK to save and exit winecfg

This should give you sound in game.

Fixing the rolling problem

The keyboard repeat in X is a problem for the game, so when running the game, turn that off before you run the game with (in a terminal window):

And turn in on after the game is run with

That will take care of that

Game setting

The only thing left now is to change the graphics options in game to “low” and set the window to run in full screen mode (remember that you are running in a virtual desktop so the size is what you specify in the /desktop part on the command line)

Done!!!!!

You can now test play the game. If you later decides to try out the full game, you only need to get the Download key to convert the install to a full game. No need to reinstall the game. 🙂