[Wine] Various WoW errors in Ubuntu 9.04 w/Wine 1.0.1

[gamecoder]

To begin, let me say this: I am a complete Linux beginner. I have used Windows up through XP all my life, and I installed Ubuntu on my poorly-specked laptop in the hopes of it running better. This is to say, your help is deeply appreciated, but unless you assume I know nothing, it will not be much help at all.

The computer in question is a Sony VAIO VGN-FS980. It runs on the Intel 915GM chipset and has onboard graphics (GMA 900, I believe). When I was playing WoW on WinXP, the basic benchmark was ~28 FPS outdoors with all effects settings on "Low" and the screen resolution at 1280x800, so I was not expecting much in the way of performance when I decided to switch to the Wine interpreting environment.

I now have installed on this machine Ubuntu 9.04 and Wine 1.0.1, following the instructions at http://www.winehq.org/download/deb . I installed WoW (no expansion packs) using the universal download client, which I was only able to manage by running wow.exe and attempting to sign in; up until the most recent patch, the launcher would crash without any useful installation information. WoW is mostly functional in D3D mode, clocking an impressive 7FPS at 800x600 in Ironforge.

Let me list my issues in descending order of importance:

- When I add the line 'SET gxApi "opengl"' in Config.wtf, all 2D except for the mouse cursor is rendered as solid black.
- When I configure my video settings within WoW and click 'Apply', Ubuntu crashes. I assume that this is a crash within Wine, but perhaps not.
- When the game is applying a patch after downloading, the only thing that shows in the view that's supposed to display the patch notes is the text "Please enable JavaScript," and a combo box that enables me to select "English" or "Español".

I have not seen these problems listed on http://www.wowwiki.com/Wine/Troubleshooting , https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft , or http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=17421 , so I've turned to this forum. I hope I'm not the only one with these bugs, as that is always depressing.

Thank you in advance for your help.