Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately. 
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.
Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.
The ‘Good News’ :
Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.
The ‘Bad News’ :
I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive. @*&# !!! Bah!
Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.
Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.
WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]
Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]
Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]
Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]
email
Facebook
Twitter
PDF
StumbleUpon
LinkedIn
MySpace
