Running Stardock’s “Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion” on Linux

Posted on July 17, 2012 by brousch

My sister works at Stardock, a company in the Detroit area, and she has been pestering me to try one of their games. It took a while for me to get motivated enough to do so since Stardock’s games are for Windows and I haven’t really been a gamer since I switched to Linux at home in 2005. However I heard there have been big improvements in WINE since last I’d tried it, so I finally found a few hours of free time to give it a go.

First I installed the WINE PPA into Ubuntu 12.04 to make sure I had the most recent version. Then I installed wine1.5-amd64 and playonlinux. PlayOnLinux provides a nice GUI for WINE and made installing the Steam client very easy. After Steam was installed, it was easy to open it up and install “Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion”. I was pleasantly surprised when everything just worked. Those WINE folks are really impressive!


$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install wine1.5-amd64 playonlinux
$ playonlinux

My laptop was well below the specs suggested by Stardock for the game, and I was running under WINE, so I lowered all of the graphics and detail as far as possible. The game ran perfectly. I worked through the first tutorial with no problems at all. Now all I have to do is find hundreds of hours of free time so I can play more!

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  • JKL

    Yes wine has made great improvements, however have you tried playing it in full screen, check if by any chance your keyboard works with the game. Mine loses window focus from the game and acts like it was my ubuntu desktop who still has focus.

    • brousch

      Since this post I have changed computers and haven’t reloaded the game, but I don’t remember any problems in full screen. I was using Kubuntu, not Ubuntu, so you could be seeing an issue with Unity.

      • JKL

        That’s very likely, Unity is a bit greedy when it comes to focus. I might install Gnome alongside with Unity and use it exclusively when playing. Previously I didn’t had issues with Gnome and full screen apps running through Wine, so this might just do it.
        Thanks for you’re reply.

      • JKL

        Before trying Gnome, first I tried Unity without Compiz effects (Unity 2D), and Sins no longer suffered from the problem of losing window focus, therefore the keyboard is working well now.
        I’m sure Gnome would also do it, as long Compiz effects were disabled, well I guess is just one more game who does not play well with Compiz. Anyway, having Compiz on when running full screen games is a waste of resources, that could very well be used in the game.
        One more thing we have learned together.

      • JKL

        After a few hours of playing I’ve determined it is best to use Gnome. The performance of the game is quite better compared when running with Unity 2D.

        So for those running Ubuntu with Unity as the default environment, you can install the Gnome environment as it was used on Ubuntu previously with “sudo apt-get install gnome-panel”.

        Afterwards simply log out of the session and when selecting your User prior to login, click the Ubuntu symbol close to your Username and select Gnome Classic and login as usual. You can chose your environment this way next time and go back to Unity.