LOTRO Going Free to play & pylotro

Well Lord of the rings online is going free to play on the 10th of September. Some of us over at the Ubuntu forums were wondering if pylotro would be updated. So I email the developer and asked him and he has since posted over at the forums that he indeed plans on updating pylotro for the change. So good news for all you linux loving lotro players, including me!

LOTRO & DDO on Kubuntu 10.04

I wanted to share how I have gotten both Lord of the Rings Online & Dungeons & Dragons Online Eberron Unlimited working on my Kubuntu 10.04 install

My Methods will require you to either have a copy of windows running in virtualbox or a dualboot with a working LOTRO install.
First I downloaded pylotro Though the program is called pylotro it is a launcher for both LOTRO & DDO. I also download and installed wine. My current working version is 1.2-rc1

  1. I used the regular download manager from turbine in Virtualbox and downloaded both LOTRO & DDO . You should make sure to do full download of all game files, be forewarned it could take a while.
  2. I created a folder called Turbine in
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/
  3. Using grsync I copied everything from
    C:\Program Files\Turbine\
    to
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine
  4. Using winetricksI installed
    • win2k
    • gecko
    • vcrun2003
    • vcrun2005
    • vcrun2005sp1
  5. I then installed pylotro in wine
  6. Once I ran pylotro I had to go into the settings and point it to my LOTRO and DDO installs. While I wasn’t able to patch DDO I can play it just fine. With LOTRO I was able to patch and everything runs just fine.
  7. Note You’ll have 2 folders(1 if you only play LOTRO or only play DDO) in your /home directory called
    Dungeons and Dragons Online
    and
    The Lord of the Rings Online
    These would generally be the folders that would appear in your Documents
    folder in windows.This folder will normally hold your
    UserPreferences.ini file along with your lotro.keymap file. For reference HERE is a copy my UserPreferences.ini file

I haven’t had any sound issues and my game seems to run fine. Of course I
don’t use pulseaudio being on kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. One thing I
did notice is that settings aren’t saved to the ini file so if you say
adjust your sound one session then log and come back later your need to
readjust them. I worked around this but just editing the volume settings
in the actual UserPreferences.ini file instead of using the in game
options.