Play Istaria On Linux

Linux OS

Many members of the community, including those among the development team, utilize Linux full-time and have created resources related to running Istaria on Linux. A collection of these resources includes the following:

2022.09.27 Special Step for New Patcher

If you had an existing install and the latest patch is having problems, this is because we switched to only lower case filenames for the resources folder. Please use the following command to delete the old style upper case files.

cd "/home/<YOUR LOGIN>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/istaria/resources"

find . -type f -name "[[:upper:]]*" -delete


Ubuntu 22.04 Steps

  1. Install Wine6.0.3 stable and Winetricks (as of 2022.10.28, Wine 7 does not work).
    • From the command line: sudo apt-get update
    • From the command line: sudo apt-get install wine-stable winetricks
  2. Run Winetricks
    • Click "Select the default wineprefix"
    • Click Install a Windows DLL or Component
    • Scroll to vcrun2005, click check box and click OK
    • Scroll to d3dx9_36, click check box and click OK (this particular version is very important)
    • Go back to the main window
    • Click Install a Font
    • Scroll to corefonts, click check box and click OK
  3. Download Istaria setup.exe from http://www.istaria.com
  4. Right click the setup.exe that you downloaded, click Permissions tab, and make sure the "Allow executing file as program" is checked. Click Close.
  5. Double click setup.exe and install Istaria
    1. The installer will incorrectly detect memory and display a warning - click Yes to continue.
    2. Don't download Java
    3. Don't install the Windows C++ libraries
  6. If nothing happens, right-click setup.exe and click "Open with Wine...". 

Your setup is complete.

At this point, you can optionally install Java in Wine (see wineTricks) or make sure that your system is up to date with Java (native to Linux) and update your shortcut to call the Java launcher directly (see Creating a Launcher Script below). If you decide to install Java within Wine, your gameplay shortcut should be jlauncher.exe  This executible is a wrapper for calling Java to run launcher2.jar 

nVidia Performance
If you are running with an nVidia card, you will get a very significant performance boost by enabling the following environment variables:

__GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATION=1
__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE=1
__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_PATH=~/.nv/cache

To edit, use your favorite editor to open the environment variables file:
sudo -H gedit /etc/environment

Make sure to make the shader cache folder with: mkdir ~/.nv/cache

These and other performance flags can be found here:

Creating a Launcher Script
You may want to setup a desktop script to run the Java launcher directly, instead of having to install Java within Wine. This is the recommended method of running Istaria, but has a small manual step to implement. Create a file on your desktop called istaria.sh - then open the file using a text editor (gedit or vim).

Add the following lines:

cd "/home/<YOUR USER>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/istaria"
java -jar launcher2.jar


Legacy Information
The following information may be out of date, but is included for completeness.

Walk-Through Guides:
http://community.istaria.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17235
http://community.istaria.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19487

Wine Resources:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2696&iTestingId=33529

Other Resources:
http://lists.transgaming.org/pipermail/winex-devel/2004-February/000128.html
http://games.cedega.com/gamesdb/games/view.mhtml?game_id=3254


If you don't know your login or password, please send an email to [email protected],
along with possible email, login name or character names.

Helpdesk FAQ
Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted