I noticed that all of the guides for using wine to install or use LoL were completely out of date and for the most part, did not work. After a few hours of fiddling with it, I have almost a perfectly playable LoL environment on wine.

NOTES: I don't provide a script. I expect that you know a little bit about what your doing and even though somethings I say are abstract, they should be pretty simple. If anything is even near difficult to do, I will mention and provide a method to accomplish it.

Here we go:


1. Make sure you have the correct video drivers installed.

What, expecting wine first? Nope. Most people I see about problems apparently ask if I have drivers installed correctly because that's the most common problem with people using wine. You will have no hardware acceleration capability if you do not have drivers installed and a good majority of games, including LoL, will not play. Please consult your Linux Distro's specific support for installation of your drivers.

2. Gettting, compiling, and installing WINE 1.3.7.

NOTE: This guide is indeed specific to 1.3.7. It may work within a few versions both ways with wine but I can't tell for certain so don't gripe at me.

Unfortunately, even with the latest and greatest of wine, we must still patch it and compile it ourselves* (please see notes below for distribution specific methods).

Grab the wine tarball here: http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/...-1.3.7.tar.bz2

Then mv it to a directory you want to extract it in and extract it: tar xaf wine-1.3.7.tar.bz2

Now, we need to patch it. Part of the API that LoL uses is not implemented fully and as a result, the launcher will not work without this patch (it will crash after the EULA).

Grab the patch here: http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=25672

Move the patch into the wine directory and to patch: patch -p1 < filename.patch

Now, that we have the source ready and patched, we can compile and install it: ./configure && make depend && make && su -c 'make install'

Now go grab a cup of joe, orange juice, or beer. This is going to take a long (long) time.

Distro Specific Installation
I'm not sure about other distros, but I've provided a package to do all of this for you on my favorite distro. If you have a package to use with another package manager, hit me up and I'll post them!

Arch Linux: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=39529


Installing LoL
Installing LoL was rather difficult for me to get working to be forward. There were quite a few undocumented bugs to deal with and find workarounds (and hopefully fixes for them future wine versions). However, I got everything working almost perfectly.

So, the first thing I'll say is that I will not be telling you how to add desktop icons for LoL. The second thing I'll say is that the launcher does not update correctly at some point because of a glitch with the updater (not wine) and as a result, we must download the files manually using an FTP server which is why you will not have desktop icons by default.

Let's begin:

Step 1: Create the basic LoL folder structure. Move to your wine directory->drive_c and add the folder "Riot Games". This isn't needed really, but I like to keep the default. Moving on...

Step 2: Download the files via FTP provided by one of LoL's wrenchmen (Eambro). I'm about to post his FTP here without his permission so if anyone has a problem with me posting it or even using it, tell me please and I will immediately remove it and provide an alternative if needed. Here is the FTP details:

- Hostname/Server Name: ftp.wrench-box.com
- Username: anonymous@wrench-box.com
- Password: (Leave this field blank)
- Port: 21

In the base directory, you'll find two folders named "League of Legends" and "Test". Simply download the "League of Legends" directory into your "Riot Games" directory and you have the entire LoL game downloaded. For videos and tutorials on how to use FTP, please consult this post: http://www.leagueoflegends.com/board...d.php?t=325943

Step 3: Applying some tricks to fix wine to work with LoL. In order to do most of these, the most simple solution is to use winetricks, found here: http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
The script may be used wherever. I personally put it into /usr/local/bin to use it globally but its preference. Also, be sure to "chmod 755 winetricks" to be able to execute it.
Now that we have winetricks, time to use it. The winetricks applied are rather specific and I will explain why each are needed:

winetricks vcrun2005
This is needed because PVP.net client requires the msvcp80.dll which is currently not implemented by wine.

winetricks d3dx9
This is needed because the internal implementation of wine is not sufficient enough to play LoL. This will hopefully change in the future soon.

winetricks adobeair
This is needed for the PVP.net client which is based on adobeair. The launcher will attempt to install it for you but I do not recommend using it. winetricks installs adobeair2 from the get go where as the launcher does not.

winetricks ie7
The launcher itself will not work properly without ie7. This will change very soon in wine hopefully as this wine implementation of ie is high priority.

winetricks glsl-disable
This is needed to, er, render active objects. Without disabling glsl, none of the turrets, champions, or minions will show up.

NOTES: Use of d3dx10 may be possible but I haven't tried it. If anyone wants to try, give me a heads up and I'll post the better result up.

Configuring LoL in game
The actual LoL game will look strange at first. You'll have black meshes flashing about and things my look ugly. To fix this, hit escape, go to Video, and turn Shadows off. With this, it should be fixed and everything should look perfect. Please note that the war fog doesn't work and there is currently no fix since glsl-disable also disables this as well.

Also, in your "League of Legends/game/DATA/CFG/defaults" directory, you *can* change the following values for more FPS. It can sometimes be hard to tell what your highlighting though. These values determine the style of effect that happens when you highlight an actor.

* Game.cfg

[MouseOverEffect]
Style = 0

* GamePermanent.cfg

[FriendlyNametag]
Glow = 0

[EnemyNametag]
Glow = 0

[PlayerNametag]
Glow = 0

[FloatingText]
Glow = 0

Things that do not work
The settings button in the launcher does not work.
The news page in PVP.net client does not work.
The shopping cart page in PVP.net client does not work.<-- I'm going to work on this through wine here soon.
The fog of war in-game doesn't work. <-- Because of glsl-disable. I want to work on this as well but not sure if I can.
Reports of some buttons looking funky on some characters have been reported but not confirmed.
Fire and water sprites. Well, they work, they just look funky...
Occasionally, I've found that the champion struggles with selecting another champion. This isn't too common and I can't figure out if this is my fault.


Notes
If you find something wrong with this guide, please tell me! I like feedback and I am absolutely terrible at tutorials (ask some people I've tutored). Also, if you have problems, comment about them! I suck at explaining but I'm good at solving.

Also, the installer for LoL (Pando Media Booster) does work. The reason why I do not use it is because of a glitch in the Launcher where it will fail to find a file that exists for reasons I can't quite pinpoint yet (as it seems to be a problem with the launcher and not wine). If you want to automate desktop icons through the installer (even though you have to download 900MB of files for no reason..) you can. Be noted that the installer will get stuck when it starts and to fix this, you need to create the "Riot Games" directory manually.

I also ask that this be sticked but seeing as how I'm the one who posted this and not a LoL staffer, I can't picture Linux priority being very high for unobvious reasons. I'm ALL for a native Linux client.

Ah, I forgot to mention that most of this was used ina 32-bit wine prefix. I unfortunately did not care to tinker with 64-bit wine as winetricks isn't compatible with it as far as I could tell.

@ Lasanha do LIDL: "glxinfo | grep OpenGL" should show you whether Linux is using hardware accelerated drivers. I can't really help much because of the diversity of video cards / video card drivers. I personally use an ATI HD5750 with Catalyst drivers but some claim that open drivers work. I'm not sure, I haven't tested any of them except for proprietary Catalyst.

ALSO: I could not get it to work with ie6. Supposedly, sometime in the past, the game switch dependances from ie6 to ie7 libarires. If it works for you thats fine. I've only been able to get it to work in ie7 or ie8.

I keep getting can't connect to pvp.net server after putting in my account & password but i can refresh and i see the server status online after hitting wine lol.launcher.exe.

Using OpenSuse 11.3 32 bits.
Video: AMD Radeon 4890
Wine: 1.3.7
Winetricks: vcrun2005, vcrun2010, d3dx9, adobeair, ie8, glsl-disable

With ie7 the launcher is white.
With ie6 Can't connect to pvp.net error
With ie8 Can't connect to pvp.net error

some one make a torrent to share this please

I'm not really sure what you would want a torrent for, everything that's needed is in the OP.

So I've given LoL a shot in wine and it really doesn't work all that well, even with the setup instructions provided (I tried without (didn't work at all) and with (client would freeze)). Maybe it's just wine 1.3.7 vs 1.3.8 but the client freezes after about 30 seconds, every time. I guess wine is just fidgety with it's versions like that.

While I love arch linux as it's probably one of my favorite distroes (along with Chakra (i.e. kdemod)). I'm running Linux Mint right now and in order to build wine it's really simple (or if your'e running ubuntu), just apt-get build deps wine (or whatever the apt-get command for build dependencies is, pacman is way better).

I don't think too many people really try and play this game under wine.

They just released a hotfix which fixes this issue (probably indirectly, as I doubt they're fixing it JUST for wine users but you never know I guess).