Unofficial Guide to Running SoaSE on Wine

As suggested by TFL BigBANGtheory here is a basic guide to installing Sins of a Solar Empire on Linux using Wine. Please note that Linux is not officially supported by Stardock or Ironclad. Also, please do not send in any minidumps that are generated while running Sins on Linux. The problem may be Linux/Wine related and not a problem with Sins itself so we don't need the nice devs wasting their time looking at them - they have enough work already.

Summary of steps:
1. Install Wine
2. Configure Wine with winecfg
3. Install Sins of a Solar Empire
4. Run Sins with Wine

Step 1: Install Wine.

If you are running Ubuntu or another Debian based distro, good instructions for doing this can be found here: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb (Thanks XRolando!). Please note that Ubuntu users cannot simply install it from the Ubuntu repos because the version currently in the Ubuntu repositories (as of January 3rd 2008) is outdated and will not run Sins properly. Version I used was 0.9.52.

Instructions for other distros can be found here: http://www.winehq.org/site/download.

Step 2: Configure Wine

To configure Wine run winecfg from a terminal:

$ winecfg

This will launch a setup GUI. Here are the settings I used (note that there may be other ways to make it work... this is just what I did). Any settings I don't mention were just left at their defaults:

Under the Applications tab I set the Windows Version to Windows XP

Under the Graphics tab:

• I unchecked Allow DirectX Apps to stop the mouse leaving their window
• Unchecked Allow the window manager to control the windows.
• I did check Emulate virtual desktop and set it at 1024x768 (adjust that to your own preference). This is not required but I recommend it so that if the game freezes up you still have use of your monitor to kill the process.

Under the Drives tab I just clicked Autodetect and accepted the defaults.

Under the Audio tab I unchecked the OSS drivers and checked the ALSA drivers.

Click OK to exit winecfg.

Step 3: Install Sins

There are two options for installing Sins.

Option 1: Installing From DVD

If you purchased Sins at retail or ordered online and chose to receive a boxed copy then you can install from the DVD. This is probably the fastest way to do it.

To install, simply change directory to your DVDROM drive and run setup.exe with Wine. My DVD drive is found at /media/cdrom0/ but yours may be different.


$ cd /media/cdrom0
$ wine setup.exe


This will launch an installer. Follow the instructions it gives you. Should be very straightforward. When it finishes it will launch Sins. Now that it is installed we need to install the latest patch (at the time of this writing it was version 1.02) so exit Sins for now and go to https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/update.aspx (you will need to be registered and logged in to do this) and download the patch. Once downloaded, run the patch with Wine:


$ cd /directory/where/you/downloaded/the/patch
$ wine Sins_Bonuspack_102_setup.exe


The wizard this launches is also very straightforward.

Option 2: Installing from Stardock Central

If you purchased Sins online, don't have your DVD yet, or just don't feel like using the DVD then you will need to install Stardock Central in order to download and install Sins.

Download the Stardock Central installer from www.stardock.com then run it with wine:

$ cd /directory/where/you/downloaded/the/installer
$ wine sdcentral_setup.exe


This will launch the SDC installer. Follow the directions exactly as if you were running it in Windows.

Once installed, launch SDC with Wine:


$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Stardock/SDCentral/
$ wine sdcentral.exe


Then use SDC to install Sins as if you were doing it in Windows.

Unfortunately, with recent versions of Wine, SDC has had some trouble installing Sins. It can fail at the point where it attempts to download sin.sdc. If this happens to you the workaround is to install an older version of Wine for the Sins install and then reinstall the current version to actually run Sins. Thanks for pointing this out, Radtoo.

To do this go to http://www.winehq.org/site/download, select your distribution, and then find the list of previous versions that are available. For Ubuntu, for example, you would select Ubuntu from the list and then click the link under "Older .deb packages," download the package, and install it.

A version of Wine known to work well with SDC and install Sins properly is 0.9.47 so I'd recommend going with that one.

Once you have version 0.9.47 installed, run SDC and install Sins of a Solar Empire exactly like you would in Windows.

Once the install is finished you can go ahead and reinstall the most recent version of Wine.

Step 4: Run Sins

Now to run Sins you can either run it from SDC or run it more directly with Wine. Depending on how you installed it, the Sins directory will be in one of two places (unless you specified a different location during instillation).

If installed from the DVD:
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Stardock\ Games/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/

If installed using SDC:
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Stardock/TotalGaming/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/

To run Sins, change directory to the Sins directory specified above and then run:


$ wine Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire.exe



Notes:
While the beta versions of Sins worked quite well under Wine the retail release has been plagued with crashes. While it seems to be better with Wine 0.9.55 than with previous versions I still get crashes every 20 minutes or so. Others have reported it running quite well for them, however, so your experience may vary. In any case I would recommend saving often so that you can pick up where you left off if the game crashes.

Font Size Bandaid

Currently the fonts don't display properly - they are too big and often trail off of the screen. I have partially fixed this by messing around with the .font files in the ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Stardock\ Games/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar \Empire/Font folder. More specifically I adjusted the "Height" value down to a smaller number so that it would display properly.

The modified files can be downloaded here www.honorguardonline.com/sins/sinsfontfix.tar.gz. Just replace the .font files in your ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Stardock\ Games/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar \Empire/Font folder with the ones provided in the download (I would recommend making a backup of the originals first just in case, for whatever reason, you want/need to go back to the original version).

I only fixed the most grievous problems so there are still areas that need work. If anyone feels industrious enough to fix some of the others please share your results. It would be most appreciated.