My entire switch to Linux was highly dependent on one factor: could I run Aurora Character Builder?
Aurora Character Builder is a D&D tool for making character sheets.
Guides I've read previously make it look like its working (and loosely, it does), but the second you try to save a character and load it, you'll run into major issues.
Here’s my super low terminal usage guide to install Aurora.
Configuring Wine through the Heroic Games Launcher
- Wine needs prefixes, and Heroic Games Launcher is really good at downloading and configuring them in a GUI. Heroic Games Launcher is available in the Software app!
- In the Wine Manager tab, get Wine-GE-Proton8-26 (other versions might work, this was just the one I used at the time that did).
- In the Library tab, add a game.
- Name it Aurora-Builder (not Aurora Character Builder—the spaces are a curse later), select Windows, your Wine-GE-Proton version, and the “Aurora setup.msi” file as the game file, for now.
- Don’t run it! Or you’ll need to remove the game and re-add it.
- Instead, configure the Settings of the “Game”.
- In Advanced, go down to Environment Variables
- in the left side box add:
- WINEARCH
- in the right box, put:
- win32
- Click the + button to add it.
- in the left side box add:
- Now, let’s configure the prefix:
- Back in the WINE tab, scroll to the bottom, click WINETRICKS and then OPEN WINETRICKS GUI.
- Select the default wineprefix (it is actually our Heroic prefix).
- You can tell them whether you want to send feedback if this is your first time.
- Select “Install a font”
- Then “arial”
- Ignore warnings/errors that pop up – don’t even click them – they are basically telling you to wait.
- Select “Install a Windows DLL or component”
- Select “dotnet48” and “d3dcompiler_47”
- Again, ignore the warnings and wait for the download/install to finish. This will take many minutes, but the Winetricks GUI will pop up again on its own when it is done.
- Don’t mess up now! Don’t run the installer yet! We need to run WineCfg.
- Cancel out of WINETRICKS (Cancel, Cancel, click subwindow X button), and you should be back in the WINE tab of the “Game Settings,” again, at the bottom, click WINECFG instead of WINETRICKS.
- In the Libraries tab of WineCfg, we need to disable every last d3d library—d3d8, d3d9, d3d10core, d3d11, d3d12, d3d12core and so on if there are more.
- So, for each and every d3d, click the library (i.e., d3d8), then Edit, then Disable, then OK.
- Then hit “Apply”
- Close the Settings.
- In Advanced, go down to Environment Variables
The installer and the app executables.
- We can run the installer we setup earlier now.
- Run the installer by clicking the play button, and it will install it to the prefix by just going through the default install options.
- Now, lets change the exe to be the newly installed Aurora.exe
- In Heroic’s Library screen, click the App’s Image Tile to get to the App info.
- Click the 3 dots in the top right corner.
- Click Edit App/Game
- In the “Select Executable,” use the file browser to select:
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Games/Heroic/Prefixes/default/Aurora-Builder/drive_c/Program Files/Aurora/Aurora Character Builder/Aurora Builder.exe - Click Finish
- You can also add shortcuts here if you don’t mind using Heroic all of the time.
- In the “Select Executable,” use the file browser to select:
- Click Play Now to make sure it’s working!
- In Heroic’s Library screen, click the App’s Image Tile to get to the App info.
- Great! You now have access to Aurora. You can move your Aurora configuration files from Windows into the new 5e Character Builder folder in your Documents.
- If you copy a bunch of xmls (from your Windows installation of Aurora) into the “custom” folder on Linux, Aurora will take forever to start the very first time, but it’ll be faster after that first time.
- You can install even more fonts to make it even run cleaner, some other guides suggested putting the whole C:/Windows/Fonts folder into the wine prefix’s corresponding drive_c/Windows/Fonts folder.
Finishing touches.
- Using Heroic is convenient for the setup and all, but maybe you don’t want it to run every time you run Aurora. No problem. Let’s change the desktop files to better reflect that.
- Make a text file named Aurora.desktop on the Desktop that contains:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Aurora
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/YOUR_USERNAME/Games/Heroic/Prefixes/default/Aurora-Builder/" /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.var/app/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl/config/heroic/tools/wine/Wine-GE-Proton8-26/bin/wine C:\\\\windows\\\\command\\\\start.exe C:\\\\Program\ Files\\\\Aurora\\\\Aurora\ Character\ Builder\\\\Aurora\ Builder.exe
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=BE01_Aurora Builder.0
Categories=Game;
- Yes, all of those \'s need to be there. That's the curse of "spaces" (" ").
- You need to adjust “YOUR_USERNAME” to be your user name, and adjust “ Wine-GE-Proton8-26” to be whatever version you have.
- If you want the icon to show up, you can adjust Icon=BE01_Aurora Builder.0 to lead to the path of a png file. (i.e., Icon=/home/YOUR_USERNAME/my_icon.png)
- I left “Icon=BE01_Aurora Builder.0” because if you had ever tried to install Aurora through the default wine or Zorin’s Windows App Support, that icon will exist!
- Then, right click on the Aurora.desktop file and Allow Launching
- For example, with a username of chronosj and the latest wine version, you might end up with:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Aurora
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/chronosj/Games/Heroic/Prefixes/default/Aurora-Builder/" /home/chronosj/.var/app/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl/config/heroic/tools/wine/Wine-GE-latest/bin/wine C:\\\\windows\\\\command\\\\start.exe C:\\\\Program\ Files\\\\Aurora\\\\Aurora\ Character\ Builder\\\\Aurora\ Builder.exe
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/chronosj/aurora.png
Categories=Game;
Getting it on the Dash
- You can copy that Aurora.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/
- Now it will show up in your “Start Menu,” and you can Pin to Dash.
I sincerely hope this helps someone out.
Best,
ChronosJ