For years now, as a Linux user, I have been pretty staunchly in the camp of wanting to use OpenMW for all of my Morrowind needs. It is wonderful. But I've also had at least a passing interest in supporting the original engine and its enhancements under linux, if for no other reason than to muck about with the Construction Set. So, today I set out to get a playable copy of Tamriel Rebuilt running under MCP, MGEXE, and MWSE running on a modern linux system.

I started with some old PlayOnLinux scripts I wrote back in 2010, and modified at up until mid 2013 (10 years on OpenMW!)

It looked super scary to pick up from there, but in reality, times have changed, and DXVK has simplified things immensely and these days, I feel even the most up to date guides on reddit are doing too much!

So, please come with me on a journey.

First off, I am doing this on Archlinux, with everything updated. Wine v8.8 (And those of you wanting to use wine-staging, there are NO changes in the process)

There is a pair of packages that absolutely need to be installed upon your system aside from just Wine in order for Morrowind to run. These being the GStreamer 'good' plugins to provide Wine a way of playing MP3 files, and since Morrowind is a 32 bit application, we need to make certain to install the 32 bit versions of these plugins. I would expect for completeness, installing both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of this is recommended. Winetricks allows us to install DXVK for Graphics API translation. On arch, I issue the following command:

pacman -S wine winetricks gst-plugins-good lib32-gst-plugins-good

This gives our arch system all the compatibility layers we need. Now I just run winecfg to create my
Wine prefix.

In the long ago times of the early 2010s, at this point I would utilize winetricks to install dotnet2, directx9, and force overrides on the devenum and quartz libraries. NO LONGER! Now, I simply install dxvk, and the internal version of mono in Wine takes care of the dotnet requirements.

winetricks dxvk

Next, we can go ahead and install Morrowind utilizing whatever method you wish. I install mine using Lutris connected to my GOG account. Unlike the steam version, this provides the Construction Set as well, and eliminates the need to worry about redating any game files.

After that, I used Wine to install the MCP (and turned on the standard options in the patcher), and MGEXE, which also provides MWSE, and the libraries needed for MWSE-Lua and CSSE.

Next, I relaunched winecfg, and manually set up three overrides:

d3d8 (native,builtin)
mwse (native,builtin)
csse (native,builtin)

These three allow first, MGEXE's DirectX 8 -> 9 proxy to work
Second, MWSE support to work under Linux
Third CSSE.

Finally, I added an Application override for 'TES Construction Set.exe', and turned on Wine's 'Emulate Virtual Desktop' option under the Graphics tab to allow myself to have an actually usable Construction Set environment.

After this, its just a matter of installing TD and TR. I copied this from my OpenMW install by rsyncing the '00 Core' directory from both into my Wine/Morrowind's Data Files directory. This led to a number of case sensitivity issues with the Meshes and Textures folders that I had to resolve. I highly recommend that if you are installing mods into this, you utilize Wrye Mash, MO2, or some other mod installation system to avoid these issues.

I also would likely recommend using Valve's proton over standard Wine to play Morrowind, if you are going to try and use the original engine. It may still have the one issue I ran into with my current setup, but I expect that alt-tab issues were fixed in Proton by Valve. Specifically, Alt-tabbing out of Morrowind in Fullscreen mode crashes all rendering under standard Wine.

However, barring that, it is playable, and all MWSE, and MGE tools work for dealing with configuration and distant land Importantly however, this also gives us a working modern enhanced construction set that works flawlessly under Linux.

Enjoy!