I keep hearing about more and more people turning over to Linux, simply because it can run World of Warcraft; and, quite frankly, that's all they ever feel like playing - when they're not watching anime and stuff. But what if they'd rather not pay a second monthly subscription fee, for TransGaming Technologies' Cedega platform (which runs WoW just fine)? Well, with a lot of work, Blizzard's MMO is also supposed to be playable on Ubuntu with Wine. "A lot of work"? That don't sound right... But fear not! Desktop Linux is reporting that CrossOver Office users may soon be able to easily install and run World of Warcraft on a multitude of Linux distributions.

In a recent note to CodeWeavers supporters, Jessica Nunn, the CodeWeavers support ombudsman, wrote:

"Recent improvements in Wine have allowed CrossOver to run WoW (World of Warcraft). As a result, we at CodeWeavers have been 'testing' that particular application. Extensively. Perhaps too extensively.

[We hope to] eventually start a CrossOver guild, and to sport stylish Linux Penguin tabards in relatively short order (although we're complete n00bs, and are still figuring out how to make that happen)."

So the penguin tabard thing might not happen. But as far as running World of Warcraft on Linux goes, things are looking promising already!

"The 6.0.0 alpha2.5 build we just released should install and run World of Warcraft 'out of the box'. We're finding, though, that we need to go into Video Options, and shift to a 16 bit mode in order for it to run nicely. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to save that change either). We'll have to fix that," wrote Nunn.

So, feel like giving it a "test raid"? Then go ahead and send an email to CodeWeavers. You'll probably still have to pay for the final version of CrossOver Office 6, but maybe you can get a feel for it before it goes public. And, of course, there won't be any need for paying two monthly fees at the same time.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)