PLAY WINDOWS GAMES IN LINUX
Game developers are increasingly taking advantage of the growing market in Linux gaming, but that’s not always been the case, and even now some games aren’t released outside of Windows. Thanks to a clever tool called Wine, though, you can run many Windows games—and other apps, including Office—as though they were native to Linux.
Wine provides a skeletal virtual version of Windows, inside which you install extra components and perform various tweaks (for example, selecting which version of Windows you want to emulate) to get your app working. Sadly, it’s not a silver bullet that will get all your Windows games working in Linux, but it should be able to give you access to at least some of them.
The biggest hurdle is that Wine is a command-line tool—great for purists; not so convenient if you want to point and click your way to gaming heaven. Thankfully, others have developed graphical “wrappers” that sit on top of Wine to make it easier to use from the Ubuntu desktop.
In this guide, we’re focusing on one such free tool called PlayOnLinux. Not only does it provide a graphical front end, but PlayOnLinux (or POL to its pals) provides a series of pre-built scripts that, in
