I somehow got the whole thing to work on Arch Linux on i386. I have to switch to 64 later, so that's going to be fun and a half. I made sure I did the following:
I'll put whatever you might do in red and put in purple what I did in terms of command line.
Steps 1 and 2 are optional, but I would advise doing an update just for the sake of fps maximization.
1.Update your vid drivers to the max (this includes any commands to reconfigure your x-server. This requires a reboot to ensure the new x-settings are configured.
sudo (flavor repo system and - modifiers) (nvidia or ati named drivers)
sudo pacman -Sy nvidia
2. Run your commands to update the x.conf files with your new xserver drivers.
sudo nvidia-xconfig or sudo (whatever the ati one is)
sudo nvidia-xconfig
#####################################
REBOOT IF YOU UPDATED DURING STEP 1 & 2 for safety!
#####################################
3. Get latest wine
sudo (flavor repo system and - modifiers, such as apt-get install for Ubuntu) wine
sudo pacman -Sy wine (can do both at once, I did seperately when doing much trial and error)
4. Get latest winetricks
Either do the same as you did for wine, use an alternative system for your distro (like AUR for Arch Linux) or just get the source and manually apply it.
sudo pacman -Sy winetricks
5. Winetricks the following, and make sure you get gecko before dotnet20
sh winetricks gecko
sh winetricks dotnet20 fontfix fontsmooth-rgb gdiplus
sh winetricks gecko
sh winetricks dotnet20 fontfix fontsmooth-rgb gdiplus
6. Get a folder for pre-installed osu! (on a windows box or wherever else, I didn't want to deal with installation crap) and put it wherever you want to run osu! from.
7. Go into winecfg and default your system to pretend it's WinXP or add osu!.exe and osume.exe and make them run under WinXP. It's just one of the precautions to avoid an issue mentioned below, but it's only one way to make sure the problem doesn't arise.
8. Give osu! in wine a shot, preferably with aoss (get alsa-oss if you haven't, shame on you if that's the case!) and see how it runs. Any problems, crashes and errors might be caused by problems I listed below.
Everything works cleanly for me, no lag or stupid.
Some bugs I've encountered:
Error #1:
If you try to execute a wine script for osu! and anywhere in the path you run into permissions issues, you will always run into a Vista / 7 administration error and you will always crash. Period. Couple workarounds to this:
1. Make your script change to the osu! directory then execute wine.
2. Give your user read and write to everything in the osu! folder including the folder itself. Also give your user ownership (chmod and chown, I'll post the works for it if people want an explanation).
Error #2:
If you try changing your user file to opengl rather than d3d off the bat, I would advise going back if it fails to work like it fails for me. Also, try without the -opengl modifier too, that might fix the problem as well. I wouldn't know about opengl since it fails to work for me, but I'm just point out some simple fixes that might not jump to your mind at first.
Error #3:
Sound in the game is chopping up and I'm lagging in game! Halp!
I've hit this one a few times, including when I started it up, but I noticed quickly how this one comes up. Wine will favor ALSA or OSS, depending on what you run. I've found that the sound errors and how it's trying to emulate the sound for you can mess up osu! pretty badly. Just set sound to alsa, preferably
Hope this helps guys! Lemme know if I can help further.