The following tutorial will teach Linux users how to install the Diablo 3 game on their open source operating system.

The third installment in the Diablo franchise, Diablo III, is a dark horror/fantasy-themed role-playing game (RPG) developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.

The game features elements of the hack and slash, action RPG and dungeon crawl genres. For more details about Diablo 3, you can check out the official home page or the Wikipedia article.

Editor's note: For this guide, we have used the PlayOnLinux application. We've tested the tutorial on the current 32-bit release of the Ubuntu OS, 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). Apparently, 64-bit users will not be able to play the game, as there are some 32-bit OpenGL libraries missing.

As a side note, make sure you meet the minimum system requirements (especially the graphics card and CPU/RAM) for playing Diablo III before going through the tutorial!

To install Diablo 3 on your Linux system, follow the next step-by-step (with screenshots) tutorial.

Step 1 – Install PlayOnLinux

The PlayOnLinux developers provide binary packages and repositories for many Linux operating systems, including Fedora, Debian, ArchLinux, Frugalware and Ubuntu, as well as an universal binary package.

We can't write instructions for all these Linux distributions here, therefore if you use one of the aforementioned OSes, go HERE for detailed installation instructions.

Step 2 – Download Diablo 3

If you have bought the Diablo III DVD Edition, skip to the next step. If you don't have the money to buy the DVD version and you only have a Battle.net account with Diablo 3 registered to you, grab the installer from HERE or from your Battle.net account.

Make sure you have Wine installed on your system. Save the exe file on your desktop, right click on it and select the "Open With Wine Windows Program Loader" option...

Step 3 – Install Diablo 3

Open PlayOnLinux and follow the first time instructions to setup the application. Once these are finished, you'll see the PlayOnLinux interface. Click the "Install" button and search Diablo on the new opened window.