In keeping in step with my new found love of StarCraft, I wanted to play it on my laptop. One problem… my laptop doesn’t run on windows or mac, its powered by UBUNTU!

I love running Ubuntu, and I have never found a reason why I would need windows on my laptop. Ubuntu does everything I need it to, that is until I wanted to play a PC based game on it.

I did a little google searching and I found out that WINE on Ubuntu will play StarCraft perfectly! I gave it a go, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how well it all worked together.

Here are the steps I took:

• Open a terminal and run sudo apt-get install wine to get wine.
• After that finishes, insert the StarCraft CD into the computer
• In the terminal cd to whatever cdrom drive you put the cd in (under the /media/ directory). Mine was /media/cdrom0
• Use Wine to setup StarCraft with wine setup.exe. You’ll get the install screen for SC – enter your CD key and install the software. StarCraft will be installed under the path of
  ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
• In the terminal, run winecfg and go to the Audio tab. Set Hardware Acceleration to Emulation.
• What is StarcCaft without the Broodwar expantion? I eject the Starcraft CD and insert the Broodwar expantion CD.
  cd to the appropriate /media/ directory and run wine setup.exe.
• To play StarCraft, run wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
  I was also able to find a link to it from the Applications menu in Ubuntu.
• Lastly, I downloaded the latest patch to BroodWar from blizzard.com, and ran that with no problem.

There it was, a fully patched and running copy of StarCraft on my Ubuntu laptop. Can life get sweeter? I submit that it can not!