I've put together Wine wrappers for Arma: Cold War Assault, Arma: Gold Edition, and Arma 2: Combined Operations, allowing them to be played on Linux almost like a native game & with no Wine knowledge required.

Please note that these wrappers should be considered betas. None have been fully tested; Arma: Gold Edition in particular has for a long time had issues with Wine and only works now thanks to D9VK, and I know that Arma 2 still has some minor graphics issues at least. Also as usual multiplayer has not been tested at all and may or may not work.

Simply run the build script to create the wrapper. If the installer files are not alongside the wrapper build files then the path to them will need to be specified either by passing it as an argument to the build script with -respath="<path>" or by setting an environment variable named WINEWRAP_RESPATH containing it. You can change the path to build the wrapper in and the name of the wrapper directory with the -buildpath= and -dirname= arguments. The build path can also be set with the WINEWRAP_BUILDPATH environment variable.

The output will be a directory containing the game set up within a preconfigured Wine prefix, along with its own copy of Wine, extracted game icons, documentation, and start script(s). From there simply run the start script to play. The start script also includes options for creating a shortcut, configuring the wrapper etc.

(to uninstall simply delete the game directory and any shortcuts you created, and the game's user data directory in ~/.local/share if you don't want to keep your saves & settings)

User data is stored under ~/.local/share/arma_cwa, ~/.local/share/arma_gold, ~/.local/share/arma_2

Full details are in the readme.txt and release notes. Here is the download link:

arma_cwa_wine.tar.xz
(38.7 kB, SHA256: de1ca60cfb7d5e7eee6e30925ad5fabe6b682f48deb9951ef1828f1ac8c16722)

arma_gold_wine.tar.xz
(37.7 kB, SHA256: 9585bc3fc9145624bafabc9cbce0e81f9ad417f3258c636294c957b285ab3e8b)

arma_2_wine.tar.xz
(37.3 kB, SHA256: 3aa3ba057343f506d440bc33e0598d39eb1447c3c19659861c9ebdf9a9ae427d)

Last updated 2021/07/11

These wrappers use Wine 6.0 (Arma: Cold War Assault) and Proton 5.0-9 (Arma: Gold Edition and Arma 2: Combined Operations). Wine/Proton and Winetricks will be downloaded automatically if not previously downloaded by my wrapper scripts; to avoid redownloading for other scripts the downloaded Wine package will be stored in ~/.cache/winewrap and the redistributables will be stored in subdirectories in ~/.cache/winetricks

If anyone encounters any problems then post in this thread, Adamhm's Linux Wine Wrappers - News, FAQ &amp; Discussion and/or The "Judas&trade; does this run in Wine" thread v1.173.

For more of my Linux Wine wrappers check out post 3 in this thread: Adamhm's Linux Wine Wrappers - News, FAQ &amp; Discussion


Additional notes:

-You can enable DXVK's framerate display by setting the environment variable: DXVK_HUD=fps
If you want to create a shortcut to start the game with this set then use these arguments for the shortcut:

env DXVK_HUD=fps %command% play

- Additional packages may be necessary to enable Vulkan support on your system, e.g.: libvulkan1 and libvulkan1:i386
Users of the open graphics drivers may also need to install mesa-vulkan-drivers and mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386

Thank you very much.

It helped. Thanks to that I could run the installation efficiently and finally play :) Good Job :)

That sounds good but it would be great if someone could take the last Arma 2 patch that was only released on Steam and crack it for non steam users.

Thanks for the Linux scripts. Good to read there are ways to run these game like that.

Spectre, AFAIK the v1.63 steam patches integrated steam lobby without doing much good otherwise. Or is there something I missed recently?

This version was often regarded as the most desirable (non-steam) one: Arma 2 OA Beta v1.62, Build 103718, 05-04-'13. That is what I settled for.