Over this last weekend I went to spend some time with my parents and little brothers that still live at home. My youngest brother, Dan, was playing that old-school strategy game StarCraft. After watching him play for a bit and remembering the good ‘ol times I had playing StarCraft back in the day I thought I’d give it a try in Wine. Just as I expected it worked perfectly and before we knew it we had a three player deathmatch going on!
Yes, StarCraft is non-free software in both senses of the phrase, but if you’ve got an old copy lying around you’ll be able to play it just fine on your Ubuntu 8.04 installation.
Install StarCraft on Ubuntu 8.04
To install StarCraft (and, yes, this also applies to the BroodWar expansion), you’ll first need Wine. Wine can be installed using this command:
sudo aptitude install wine
Once you have wine installed you’re ready to get going. I did not have to tweak anything in my wine configuration to get StarCraft working. If, however, you find any wine tweaks that make game play more enjoyable please comment.
At this point simply pop in your StarCraft CD and nautilus should open the CD folder contents for you. Get the installation started by opening the “install.exe” file with wine. If your “right-click > Open With” does not offer or suggest wine you can do it manually with this command:
wine /media/cdrom/install.exe
If you have the BroodWar expansion repeat the above step for that CD as well.
Tomorrow I’ll outline how to install a patch that will allow playback without requiring the game CD. With or without the patch you should now have StarCraft available in your menu in:
Applications > Wine > Programs > StarCraft
Enjoy some old-school gaming fun with StarCraft on Ubuntu 8.04!