It’s been a while since I had to post on any issues regarding ESO play under linux but recently I upgraded PopOS 20.04 to PopOS 20.10. PopOS is System76’s Ubuntu based distribution. I’ve been running Crossover 19 and then 20.0.0 on it for a while but a week ago the launcher was stuck on the “Loading” screen.

Fixing the issue is the same as the last post I made on ESO – a Thawte certificate issue. In this case the issue is a bit more glaring because the Symantic group who is the root signer for ESO’s certificates basically failed a security audit and has had their certs removed as being authorized in several different CA authorities.

Getting around the issue for ESO players requires adding these possibly insecure root certificates into your CA authority on your system. There is a long post about it here: https://www.protondb.com/app/306130 which involves some leg work or you can download the .crt files I’ve built and tested for 20.10 here. Simply untar the thawte directory from the tbz2 you download, copy the directory to /usr/share/ca-certificates, add this text to /etc/ca-certificates.conf:

thawte/thawte_Primary_Root_CA.crt
thawte/thawte_Primary_Root_CA-G2_ECC.crt
thawte/thawte_Primary_Root_CA-G3-SHA256.crt
thawte/thawte_Primary_Root_CA-G4-DSA.crt
thawte/Thawte_Timestamping_CA.crt

and then run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates

to activate these certificates. This will allow the launcher to download its information from Zenimax and function properly under Crossover on Ubuntu 20.10 again.

Happy Halloween!