Lutris, Exit Error 256, Blizzard Battle.net

Published: at 06:00 PM

Friend of mine recently swapped to Pop!_OS and wanted to play World of Warcraft. My own feelings about Blizzard aside, I wanted to be able to help them.

TLDR

Order of Events

  1. They installed Lutris and then used the install script found for Battle.net.
  2. It worked
  3. They uninstalled Lutris
  4. They reinstalled Lutris
  5. They got the Exit Code (256) error when attempting to install Battle.net again.

Resolution

  1. Delete the .wine folder found in the home directory. You will need to view hidden files and folders in order to see this in your files window.
  2. Delete the folder that contained the original install of Battle.net from the first Lutris installation. Only you know where that is as you selected it in the first install.
  3. Reinstall the script from Order of Events step 1.
  4. Everything works.

Hope this helps someone else who may have run into the issue.

Reasoning for what happened

I’m still new to having Linux as my daily driver. I’m much more used to running Linux distros as a server OS for the work that I do than using it to just get things done. So some of this is speculation mixed with a dose of how I see what may have occured.

I believe that when they uninstalled Lutris, all the config settings for the package were lost so it was unable to use the previous .wine folder. I also think that the install script doesn’t like trying to install into directories that already have contents.