Starcraft 2 and Linux - Part 1

Okay, I'm a bit late to the party. I only bought the game a couple of days ago after finally getting around to playing the demo.


Last week I installed the StarCraft 2 demo with winetricks and I really enjoyed it, a lot! So after spending a few hours on the demo I finally decided that this game is worth the while and I headed out to buy it.

First check the on-line store at Battle.net, $80-00 + (R600-00, ZAR), are you kidding me?! NEVER!
So I put that on the ice, no way am I ever going to pay that much for a game.
The rest of the week, whenever I went past a gaming shop I would just quickly pop in to see what they list it for, and finally I got the game for $58-00 (R400-00), now that is more like it, still very expensive for a year old game, but do-able.

At home I popped in the DVD and started the installation... I/O error. No problem, copy the entire DVD to PC, I/O error.
Okay, then dd it to an ISO, I/O error.

Lets try another PC, I/O error. How can this be, it seems the disk is corrupt? Well, yes and no. It seems there is a bug in ext4 that does not handle single large files very well. The main installation file of the game is 7GB large.
You can read more on this here:
Error while copying file
Any of the following topics

So it is either a DVD issue or a file system issue, whatever the case I will need to get the digital copy.

No problem, I'll just download the game client from Battle.net.
What a frustration this was, 36 hours it took me to finally finish the download, 36 hours!
And each time my line DSL is reset, and I get assigned a new IP, the download client would fail with a "this download is not authorised".
I then have to log into Battle.net, get the new client and start again. Luckily it resumes the download but I had to download a new client at least seven or eight times.

Wow, I bought the hard copy and still have to play a single skirmish.

It seems that the everything went fine with the installation of the digital copy and the game is now being updated, nineteen patches to install.

Once that is done I'll be back with a more "how-to" post on getting the best performance out of StarCraft 2 on Linux.