How to Play Hearthstone on Linux, Updated Tutorial

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is the latest title from Blizzard and it's developed for Windows, Mac OS, and iPad. There is no Linux support, but that doesn't mean that Linux users can't play it. It just takes a little bit of determination.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has been out for quite some time and we made a short tutorial a while back, teaching Linux users how to make the game work on the open source platform.

There is a twofold problem with this game. Hearthstone doesn't run on its own and it actually launches from the Battle.net client, which is a launcher that encompasses all the games from a user's Battle.net account. Both these applications need to work and users have to do a little bit of tinkering.

First of all, it's been reported that PlayOnLinux, which is a third-party application based on Wine, will run the game with some modifications, but we wanted to present a tutorial on how to make the game run with Wine directly.

Blizzard updates both the game and the Battle.net application on a constant basis and that is the main reason why a tutorial might work today and be completely irrelevant tomorrow. First of all, you will need to install Wine, but not the latest development version. In fact, users will need to get the stable release, which is quite old. If you have Wine 1.7 installed, you will need to run this command first:

code

sudo apt-get remove --purge wine1.7

We made this test in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but it should work in any distro as long as you can install this version of Wine. Open a terminal and enter these commands:

code

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.6

After the installation has been completed, open Configure Wine from the Dash, go to the Libraries tab, and enter these two names in the “New override for library”:

code

dbghelp
msvcp100

The second entry, “msvcp100,” should be left as it is, but the first one, “dbghelp,” needs to be edited. Hit the edit button and select disable.

Select the Windows 8 compatibility mode and make sure that you also select “Emulate a virtual desktop” from the Graphics tab. Select a size, like 1280 * 1024 for example, and hit Apply. If something goes wrong with Wine, it won't take the entire system with it and you can close it from the terminal.

You can now run the Battle.net client and install Hearthstone. Enjoy!

How to Play Hearthstone on Linux, Updated Tutorial

Getting to play the latest game from Blizzard is not that difficult