How to run 3DF Zephyr on Linux using Wine

Albeit this is – sadly – not an officially supported mode (which means we do not guarantee that Zephyr will always work with new versions and that we can not give technical support for issues happening on Zephyr on wine) we are happy to provide this tutorial in order to show the required process to run Zephyr on Linux.

It’s mandatory that you install Wine compiled for x86_64 architectures. If you also have an NVIDIA card that supports CUDA, you may also install the latest wine version (alongside the nvidia proprietary drivers) in order to exploit Zephyr’s CUDA capabilities.

This tutorial is based on Ubuntu 16.04. Please refer to your distribution guide for additional details.

  • Getting ready

Make sure to update your system, either via the “software updates” gui or by running sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade in your terminal.

  • Step 1 – mandatory – Install x86_64 Wine

You should not install wine from the default repository. Instead, you should either download and build the latest 64 bit wine or use a pre-compiled package. To easily do so, we can use the PPA from Wine Staging

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install wine-staging-amd64
  • Step 2 – optional – Install the latest NVIDIA and CUDA drivers
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If you have an NVIDIA card, you can use the CUDA acceleration offered by the latest Wine > 1.9.x releases. In Ubuntu, installing the proprietary driver can be done easily via the Settings/Additional Drivers window. Make sure to select the latest available driver.

You may install CUDA directly with the package downloaded from the NVIDIA website or by typing

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

Up to 3DF Zephyr 3.007, you need CUDA 7.5.

  • Step 3 – Additional setup steps
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1. set your wine configuration to Windows XP

Open a terminal and run winecfg. From the “Windows Version” menu, select “Windows XP” and then click OK.

2. install the VC++ Redist package

You may need to install the VC++ redistributable package. The easiest way to do so is by using WineTricks.

 

  • Step 4 – install 3DF Zephyr
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At this point, you can normally install and run 3DF Zephyr. Although we do not officially support this deployment mode, please feel free to post in the forums anytime!

Although both Zephyr and Masquerade have been tested an are working correctly, we have not yet tested our plugins 🙂 but we will soon!