Installing Rift On Ubuntu

Overview

1. Installing Development Version of Wine (Currently 1.3)
2. Setting up a WINEPREFIX.
3. Using winetricks to install pre-requisite components.
4. Setting a virtual desktop.
5. Configuring the Registry.
6. Installing the Game

Installing Wine

From a console, run this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Then run an update so that Ubuntu knows what apps it can install from this repository

sudo add-apt update

Then from Synaptic, you can install Wine 1.3 (Development Release).

Setup a Wine Prefix for the game

Before you start, it's a good idea to keep your Rift install separate from your other wine apps, to do this you can use a wineprefix. For some good info on wine prefixes, here's a great article on UbuntuGamer.

From a console:

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-rift

When you run winecfg, it will now configure the directories under .wine-rift. If anything goes wrong with the install, we have everything contained in it's own personal wine directory. Uninstalling is as easy as deleting the directory. When the game has finished installing, it will include the prefix in the Icon it creates to launch the game.

Tip: While I was installing, I found it easier to set the windows to a virtual desktop size. So it doesnt (potentially) go full screen and make it tricky to access my desktop if something goes wrong. To do this, open winecfg and set the desktop

The next thing we need to do, is install a couple of items to wine that Rifts needs to run smoothly.

Using Winetricks, this is as easy as running the following from a console.

winetricks corefonts d3d9

That should be enough to get started, there's a couple of registry tweaks to improve the performance on the game.

Registry Configuration

When I first installed this under wine, it went in smoothly, but performance was terrible. There were some registry tweaks recomended on the WineHQ App entry for Rift which made a huge improvement. So I have included them here.

From a console:

regedit

This will open the wine registry editor, here's a screenshot of the keys we are going to add (I'll include the explanation and text under the illustration).

Find the following path in the registry and we can add our new key below it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER » Software » Wine

Add a new Key called Direct3D and under that key we can add the following strings.

This will enable the anti-aliasing. However, we need a couple of more entries and they will be specific to your machine.  I found an issue with none of the textures loading (everything was black) when I logged in, changing OffScreenRenderingMode to fbo resolved the issue.

First off, we need to know a little about your graphics card, from a console:

lspci -n

This will output a listing like this: 

The line of interest to us, is where the number in the second column is 0300

The numbers on the right of this figure is the make and model of your graphic card, so in my case 10de:0ca3 can be read as 

10de = Nvidia
0ca3 = GT240

We can add these settings to our registry now:

0x10de

Notes:

When you add your values for DeviceID and VendorID, add 0x at the begining of the string, so mine is 10de, so in the registry I use 0x10de.

If you are unsure of your memory size for your graphic card, we can use lspci to find the value. Run lscp on it's own and find the line that refers to your graphic card, here's mine.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 240] (rev a2)

Now we can get the full details on the card with this command:

lspci -v -s 01:00.0

which gives me all the details on my graphic card, including Memory:

[virtual] Expansion ROM at d1000000 [disabled] [size=512K]

Installing Rift

wine ./Rift_LIVE_Patcher_setup.exe