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This post will be updated constantly until there is a way to play Dawn Of War 2: Retribution on the Linux platform via wine.

Previous titles of this series where unable to run because of the games running Games For Windows Live, which is totally incompatible with wine. With Retribution dropping GFWL and leaving only steam, there is a pretty good chance the game will work flawlessly.

Currently the game is in beta state, you can get a beta license to play RIGHT NOW and help develop the game by clicking here

If you have tried this and have any tips to make the game run, send me an email at admin@snott.net and I will gladly add your tip to this post and give you full credit for it (please include your OS and computer specs), the idea is to compile every bit of info the Linux community has to offer to make this great game run on Linux.

The machine I will test this in has the following specs:

– Intel core 2 duo @ 1.3GHz

– 4GB of RAM

– Nvidia Geforce G210m 512mb

– Archlinux 64 bit

– 300 GB Hard Drive

First Off you have to install steam, you can do that by following my guide here, If you already have a working steam installation, then just start downloading the game (remember you need the beta key, you can get the beta key by going here, it’s totally free!).

If you are interested in knowing if the game will work with your Linux machine before going retail this a prefect time to test, because It wont cost you anything to test, when the game goes retail (price will be $30), of course beta will be no more and you will have to pay for the game.

Also, I will test the game in 2 ways:

1- Wine

2- Crossover games (wine commercial version that makes things a lot easier by automating lots of tasks)

In short, If you are lazy and have the money get Crossover Games, if you like/want to make things by yourself or don’t want to buy anything, go with wine.

I submitted the application to the crossover application database, as of now it appears known not to work but having the application listed there would be a good boost for everyone searching ways to make this game work.

As a rule of thumb, if the game works with crossover games, It will work with wine, but wine will need you to configure all settings and install all required dependencies to make the game work.

I will also post here all of those dependencies If you want to make things different or want to test something.

At this point, known dependencies are:

1) Steam (duh!) check the guide to get a working installation of steam, else nothing will work, steam also has some dependencies on its own (like ttf-ms-fonts) so check the guide now and avoid wtf! moments.

I tried to launch the game and store the output on a log file, here is what I found that can cause problems:

003d:err:module:load_builtin_dll failed to load .so lib for builtin L”winemp3.acm”: libmpg123.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Apparently, the DLL can’t be found hence the game is unable to launch, that was the only error I got from the output, but there is a lot of stuff on the log file, you can check the log file.

I found some info on this error, wine is trying to load support for mp3 and didn’t find the file, I installed the wmp9 on this prefix/bottle, but the system still complains.

Here is what should be done to get this error to disappear, straight from wine hq:

6.11.4. MP3s do not play in Windows Media Player or applications that depend on it

For MP3 sound to play out of the box in apps that use the WMP engine and codecs, you must have 32-bit libmpg123 installed on your system and Wine must have been compiled with MP3 support.

For the more technical ones, here is a more complete log (+seh, +trace, +ntdll). Dow2r Run log

And a big one with +seh, +trace, +ntdll when I click on the game icon and steam isn’t running. DOW2 Retribution complete Log