Hi,
Here's how to get Warcraft 3 running under wine:
1. Use the latest wine cvs. Only that will work.
2. Mount the CD, and run install.exe on the CD with the winver set to win98 under config. (even though 95/98 are exactly the same when playing the game--i hate that) You should disable the ide-scsi thing because it seems to cause problems =(
3. Close the install program. Go to the directory where war3 is installed. mv the Movies folder to Movies backup. The game tries to display a movie clip on start in the retail, and it hangs wine =(
4. Download the NoCD patch for Warcraft 3 v1.00 (I don't know if 1.01 is out yet) at www.gamecopyworld.com. mv war3.exe and worldedit.exe to backup names. Copy in the patched program exe's. You may now run War3 if you wish. Warcraft 3 uses Safedisc v2. With this patch it will bypass it. Run war3 with the command "wine war3.exe -- -opengl".
5. To login battle.net, you need to bypass the exe check. With the patched version of the game, it won't work. So what I did to get it to work is moved the patched exe's to something like "war3_patched.exe" and create a symbolic link "war3.exe" that links to it. Start the game "war3.exe". To login to battle.net, open bash console. Change to the war3 directory, and reset the symbolic link to the original war3 exe, let it sleep 5 seconds, and then reset the symbolic link back to the patched version. While it's sleeping, you need to login into battle.net immediately. This is what I did to get D2 battle.net to work under wine. It should work for war3. You need to be the same version as battle.net for it to work though. (currently only 1.00 is availible for linux, and battle.net is 1.01)
6. To patch the game, you need to get the standalone patches. Set your symbolic link to the real exe's, and patch away =)
The beta in contrast worked perfectly. The retail has a couple problems =(. The advantages I find running War3 under linux/wine/opengl, are higher framerates than on both real windows, and winex. And no graphics errors in comparison to winex d3d8, and no sound problems like under real windows. My three button mouse also works unlike windows. All these advantages =)
Jesse