I figured I'd take a stab at doing something useful, so I sat down and hashed together a walkthrough for installing and running Paragon Chat on Linux, using wine! (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. If anyone reading this is better at Linux than I, please step up and put me in my place (I know you exist!))
My Linux distro is OpenSuSE Leap 42.3, but as far as I know the directory structure for Linux is the same for all distributions. I don't think there will be any mysteries or surprises when I use my own directories as examples.
You'll want the latest version of wine, and the most up to date video drivers available to you. This would be the *only* point in this process where you will need root access! I'm assuming you know how to update your system.
The first thing you'll need to do is download the essentials. You will need:
Paragon Chat (
https://chat.cohtitan.com/release/ParagonChatBootstrap.exe) (Instructions:
https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Chat)
If you still have the latest version of City of Heroes that existed when the servers shut down (Issue 23), you're in good shape, you'll just need to update them with Tequila (
http://patch.savecoh.com/tequila.exe). (Instructions:
https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Titan_Icon) If you *don't* have CoH installed, I *believe* that Tequila will install the entire game for you. I don't have much experience with Tequila, beyond updating my own files. Don't try *running* Tequila just yet!
Once you're finished with the downloads, you'll want to create a new wineprefix. Open up an XTerm window, or Konsole, or whatever terminal emulater with which you are familiar and/or comfortable, and enter:
WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" WINEARCH=win64 wine wineboot
(If you're still using a 32-bit system, use "win32" instead.)
What you're doing here is creating a new .wine directory, in which City of Heroes and Paragon Chat will live. You can give it whatever name you want that makes sense to you: .wineParagonChat, .winePChat, .wineCOH, .wineFooBar, .wineWhatEver! Just make sure to use *that* to replace my placeholder name as you read along!
If you're unfamiliar with wineprefixes, they are basically new, separate installations for Windows programs. Whatever you do to your .wineCOHDemo wineprefix will not affect your default .wine installation, and you can create other prefixes for other programs, or even the *same* program, if you're experimenting or troubleshooting. And if you completey bork your .wineCOHDemo wineprefix, you can delete that specific directory and start all over again!
And here's why you'll want a separate wineprefix for Paragon Chat: your next step is to run this in your terminal:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" winecfg
(From this point on, every time you run a wine or windows command, you'll prepend it with "env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo"", for the same reasons as explained above.)
You've launched the winecfg program, and you should immediately be presented with the "Applications" tab, which will be the only thing you need to alter. At the bottom is the entry for "Windows Version". Mine defaults to Windows 7. Change this to "Windows XP", then click "Apply", then "OK". Windows XP works fine for my purposes (running Paragon Chat and City of Heroes!), but you're free to experiment at any time if you feel it's not working properly.
Now you'll be relocating your CoH installation, or creating a new one. If City of Heroes already exists on your machine, simply COPY the entire "City of Heroes" directory, and paste it in /home/USER/.wineCOHDemo/drive_c/Program Files (x86) -- or, again, /home/USER/.wineCOHDemo/drive_c/Program Files if you're on a 32 bit machine! In your terminal window, change directories to the CoH directory. Copy Tequila.exe into this directory, and run:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" wine Tequila.exe
Then follow the instructions. My inexperience with Tequila here is of little use. On my machine, it throws errors and crashes out. I'm hoping you have better luck! If it works as I think it should, your CoH files should now be up to date.
If you're installing "fresh", I think Tequila also functions to install everything.
Once you have a functioning version of CoH in its home directory, it's time to install Paragon Chat:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" wine ParagonChatBootstrap.exe
It's safest to agree to the default settings. You might write them down for future reference. When it comes to the "Saved Costumes" and "Add Paragon Chat to Start" checkboxes, pick what you want, then click "Next", then "Finish"!
Once Paragon Chat is launched, and you get the Login screen, your username and password should be enough to get you in!
Now, if you want to launch the game from the command line, or you want to launch from a desktop icon, use this:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" wine "c:\users\USER\Application Data\ParagonChat\Bin\ParagonChat.exe"
I hope that this works for you right off the bat! However, in my own experience, it doesn't want to work properly. It opens the CoH character selection/creation screen just fine, but does not accept mouse-clicks! I accidentally discovered that adding the flag "WINEDEBUG=warn+all" to the command line "fixes" this glitch -- sort of. If you have this experience, try this:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wineCOHDemo" WINEDEBUG=warn+all wine "c:\users\USER\Application Data\ParagonChat\Bin\ParagonChat.exe"
It causes Paragon Chat to load far more slowly, which *might* be why/how it fixes the mouse-click thing. And even with that, I've discovered a whole slew of *other* glitches that I've been unable to nail down and fix. It makes everything after clicking "Log In" a bit fragile, BUT, I can eventually get a stable instance of Paragon Chat up and running, for several hours.
If you have similar problems with an unstable Paragon Chat, please refer to the post below!
-S