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How to install EA Games on Linux

Ariel Juodziukynas edited this page Jan 15, 2023 · 1 revision

Some Electronic Arts games require the EA App (link). Those games show up in the Library as Not Supported:

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This page explains the steps to install the EA App on Linux and how to link your Epic account with your EA account so the games show up in the EA App collection.

Requirements

You have to download the EA App installer for Windows from https://www.ea.com/ea-app

Install EA App

  • Click Add Game
  • Set EA App as the title
  • Note: If you have to link your Epic and EA accounts, select Wine or Wine-Staging in the Wine version selector, DO NOT use Wine-GE/Proton-GE or it won't work, you can use Wine-GE/Proton here if you don't need the linking
  • Click RUN INSTALLER FIRST
  • Select the EAAppInstaller.exe file downloaded from EA's site
  • After the installation, the EA App will start but will be broken (missing content) because of missing dependencies, kill the process
  • Click the folder icon in the Select Executable field and look for this file .../Prefixes/EA App/drive_c/Program Files/Electronic Arts/EA Desktop/EA Desktop/EADesktop.exe
  • Click Finish, now the EA App should appear in your library

We have to install some dependencies to fix the app before using it:

  • Go to the app's settings and click WINETRICKS
  • Click Ok with the Select the default prefix option checked
  • Select Install a font and click Ok
  • Select arial and click Ok
  • (If you are using Wine-GE/Proton-GE you can skip the next steps, this seems to be needed only for Wine/Wine-Staging)
  • After the font is installed, click Cancel
  • Select Install a Windows DLL or Component and click Ok
  • Select d3dcompiler_47 and click Ok

After it's done installing, click Cancel until Winetricks closes

Login into the EA App

Now you should be able to run the app with the Play button, do that and Login.

Link the Epic account with the EA account

If your games from Epic DO NOT show up in the EA App's collection, you need to link the accounts.

For this to work you need the EA App to be installed using Wine or Wine-Staging. With Wine-GE it does not set the link2ea protocol and trying to link accounts fail with this error wine: failed to open "link2ea://launchgame/<appName>?AUTH_PASSWORD=....

You need some pieces of information:

  • The legendary path: check Heroic's logs, you should see a line like (09:34:37) INFO: [Legendary]: Legendary location: /home/some/path/legendary at the top, we'll need the path
  • The app name for any of your EA games: run the command /home/some/path/legendary list -T and look for any EA game, you'll see something like * Star Wars Squadrons (App name: bobcat | Version: None), the name bobcat is what we'll use in this case
  • The wine prefix: click the EA App card in the library and it will show the WinePrefix folder there, would be something like /some/path/Prefixes/EA App
  • The wine path: you should be using Wine or Wine-Staging, so this should be /usr/bin/wine, if you are not or you have wine in another path, check the EA App's log in heroic and it should show the path in the first line after Wine Command:

Now, with all this information we have to run this command, replace <...> with the corresponding information listed above:

<legendary path> launch <app name> --origin --wine "<wine path>" --wine-prefix "<wine prefix>"

With the information from the examples, this command would be /home/some/path/legendary launch bobcat --origin --wine "/usr/bin/wine" --wine-prefix "/some/path/Prefixes/EA App"

After running that command, the EA App should open and it should ask you to link your Epic and EA accounts and your games should show up in there for you to install them.

Notes:

  • Make sure you logged in into the EA App before trying to link the accounts
  • Once the accounts are linked, you can use any Wine version to install the EA App if you need a specific Wine to run any of the games