Beta release (this is the intial, open beta version).
Old test results
The test results for this version are very old, and as such they may not represent the current state of Wine. Please consider submitting a new test report.
Selected Test Results (selected in 'Test Results' table below)
What works
Installation, sound, gameplay, UI, all graphical features
What does not
Nothing
What was not tested
I can't think of any.
Additional Comments
Works flawlessly following the steps in the HOWTO listed below. Overall game performance is somewhat slow in comparison to a Windows installation, but that is to be expected.
Earth Eternal forum users akoshka, PsyQ and others have assembled patches to hack Earth Eternal into working on WINE. The patches are required to work around bugs in Earth Eternal itself, which is closed source, so the problems cannot be solved at the root at this time.
Forum user akoshka supplies this extensive howto for patching/hacking WINE in order to play Earth Eternal:
Running Earth Eternal On WINE
As Earth Eternal is still in Beta, I would suggest you try running
the client on Windows first to make sure your hardware is supported. If
it doesn't work on Windows it's quite likely you are going to have
problems on Linux as well.
This procedure was tested on 32bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) with Wine 1.1.31 and a NVIDIA 7600 GT video card.
Patching Wine
Wine needs to patched in order to work around a few issues with Wine
and/or the client. The first is to correctly resolve the addresses of
the Sparkplay servers. This is apparently caused by the client using an
undocumented feature of the Windows Socket API.
The second and third patches are to allow the window to be resized
without crashing the client. Be warned that due to the nature of the
change, this may slightly affect the performance of DirectX in wine in
general. It doesn't appear to have any noticeable effect on playing
EE though.
4. Install required development packages. More may be required,
these got me going from a relatively clean install of Ubuntu 9.10
(Karmic). Some are just to get rid of any warnings when running the
configure stage of the wine install and may not actually be required.
wget http://www.tanktarta.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ee/ee
chmod a+rx ee
sudo mv ee /usr/local/bin
First off, prepare the wine prefix. This will set up a brand new
Wine directory solely for Earth Eternal ($HOME/.wine-ee). It will
download winetricks and apply the tricks required. You only need to do
this once or after using the uninstall command.
ee install
Now you can install the client itself. This will actually wipe out
the current and completely reinstall it. This was done because I have
yet to get the Spark updater to work properly. If this is NOT the first
time update has been run, the cached content is moved out of the way
before the re-install and moved back in when complete to save a lot of
downloading time when the game is running.
ee update
When this is complete, you are ready to play! DO NOT use the entry created in your menu, it probably won't work. Just run the script without any arguments :-
ee
There are a few other 'ee' commands you may be find useful.
clear-cache clears out cached content.
uninstall removes all trace of the game.
and command run with the EE wine prefix. E.g. 'ee winecfg'.
Option 2 - Manually
I would recommended that you start with a clean wine setup (or use a
'prefix'). There is plenty of information out there on how to do this,
but for now the simplest way would just be to move any previous
configuration out of the way
mv ~/.wine ~/.wine.backup
Download winetricks and run it with all of the required tricks. Remove when done.
The next step you may or may not have to do. This started to be a
requirement for me after an update to the client just before open beta.
For some reason the installer doesn't like the link to 'My documents'
that is created by wine, they have to be real directories. If the
installer fails to complete, try this :-
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/users/$LOGNAME
rm -f "My Videos" "My documents" "My Pictures" "My Music" "Desktop"
mkdir "My Videos" "My documents" "My Pictures" "My Music" "Desktop"
The installer will now download the rest of the client. Again, the
shortcut created on the menu probably won't work. See the section below
for details on how to create your own.
Troubleshooting
"Unable To Write Cache File" errors
These occur when game content is downloaded after the character
selection page. The download will stop and an error detailing the file
that failed will be displayed. Re-running the client may get you
further, it may not.
Make sure your per-process file handle limit is high enough. Run the command :-
ulimit -n
A number of around 1024 is way too low, a value of 20000 should be
good. The exact way to change these limits will depend on your
distibution, so check its documentation for help.
On Ubuntu at least, these are set in the /etc/security/limits.conf
file. A problem was found in Ubuntu 9.10 where the default limits file
was incorrect.
Edit the file as root :-
sudo gedit /etc/security/limits.conf
Go to the bottom of the file and look for the hard and soft limits.
Change both occurences of 'nolimits' to 'nolimit' and save the file.
Reboot, then run unlimit -n again to make sure the change has taken.
No Sound
You may need to run winecfg and play with the audio driver used. If you used the ee script, run :-
ee winecfg
If you you took the manual route, run :-
winecfg
Go to the Audio tab and try various different drivers. Depending on
your setup you may want to try Alsa, OSS or ESound. Use the Test Sound
button in there as well.
Other Bits
Creating a desktop icon
The icon that gets installed in the wine group won't work as it is.
So, you have a few ways to create your own. First download a suitable
image (I have uploaded one to
You can now either create a .desktop file manually, or use one of the tools on your desktop such as Add To Panel. If you decide to create a .desktop
file, here is a template you can use. Simply save this as a file on
your desktop called ee.desktop, you can drag the icon from there to
anywhere you want to after that.
If you are using the ee script, but it is not on the PATH, you will need to change the Exec attribute to contain the full location.
Known Issues
The client is known to crash when :-
Upon exit
Changing some video settings from the F10 menu
This guide is current as of 2009-10-26.
Forum discussion on Earth Eternal forums
Most of the wisdom here is from this thread on the Earth Eternal forums and contributors Avaera, akoshka and others.
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.
Has not worked for me
by Zopiac Keylink on Sunday December 6th 2009, 12:33
The first time I tried to install EE the installer would give me an error (this is just with downloading the installer and running it in a clean environment)
The second time I tried the automatic way. This worked up until when the game opened, where it gave me a progress bar saying "Awaiting download request..." Terminal output was a constant output of ping, FPS, etc.
The third time, after I had removed all traces of EE for another clean install, I tried the Manual way, also as described in the given Howto. That ended with me trying to open the installer, and it gave me this error:
fixme:shell:SHCreateDirectoryExW Show system error message, creating path L"C:\\users\\zopiac\\My Documents\\Sparkplay Media\\Sparkplayer (Beta)", failed with error 183
