How to play League of Legends on Chromebook

League of Legends is a team-oriented strategy game whose goal is to work together with your teammates to bring down the enemy Nexus located in the middle of their base before your opponent takes down yours. That sounds interesting. Well, in this post, we will give you a step-by-step on installing and running League of Legends on a Chromebook.

We have one problem, however. League of Legends is only available for Windows and macOS, and it doesn’t include support for Linux or ChromeOS, which is the operating system running on Chromebooks. To solve this issue and be able to run this game on our Chromebooks, we can make use of two methods.

1. Install and Run League of Legends with Wine
2. Install and Run League of Legends with LoL-Wine
3. Install and Run League of Legends with the Snap package manager

Enable Linux on Chromebook

Before getting started, you need to enable Linux (Beta) on your Chromebook. Linux(Beta) or Crostini is a feature present on the latest Chromebooks that allows you to run a Debian virtual machine on our Chromebook. That enables you to efficiently run Linux apps, develop software and even install Linux packages on your Chromebooks. Feel free to check out our detailed guide on “How to install and configure Linux Apps on Chrome OS.”

Installing League of Legends on Chromebook

Method 1: Install League of Legends with Wine

After successfully enabling Linux on your Chromebook, we can now install League of Legends on our Chromebook. Follow the steps below.

1. Update your system and install Wine with the commands below:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install wine

   

   install Wine

2. You can also add support for 32-Bit applications b executing the commands below on your Terminal.

   sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
   sudo apt update
   sudo apt-get install wine32

   

   add 32-bit support

3. To confirm and ensure that Wine was successfully installed, execute the command below on the Terminal.

   winecfg

   That will open the Wine configuration window. Here, you can set up several options: Audio, Graphics, and even the Windows version you wish to emulate. Close the window when done.

   

   wine configuration window

4. After successfully installing Wine, we can now download the League of Legends Windows setup file from their official website. You must create an account first before downloading the file setup file.
5. Rename the setup file to something memorable like “LeagueOfLegends.exe” and move the file to your Linux Files directory.
   

   move setup file

6. On your Terminal, execute the ls command and ensure you see the League of Legends setup file that you moved to the Linux Files directory. Now, run the command below to launch the setup file with Wine.

   WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX="/home/chromeready/.wine64/" wine LeagueOfLegends.exe

   

   launch setup file

7. You will see the Riot Games installation window and an option to install League of Legends. Click Install.
   

   riot games

   If this window hangs after downloading and copying the necessary files, close it and launch the setup file again with the same command below.

   WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX="/home/chromeready/.wine64/" wine LeagueOfLegends.exe

8. Next, you will see the main installation window with a Login/ Create Account section. Click Install. Depending on your internet speed, this step might take some time since the setup will download and install around 2 GB file size.
   <image>
9. After the installation process completes successfully, you can start playing if the launcher is still open. If you close the launcher, navigate to the ‘Linux Apps” section on your application menu and launch the game from there.
   <Image>

Method 2: Install League of Legends with lol-wine

This method is not very different from Method 1, where we used Wine to install League of Legends on our Chromebook. The only additional feature is utilizing several scripts developed solely to automate the tedious process of installing League of Legends on Linux systems. Follow the steps below.

Step 1. Install Wine and Winetricks

We will install Wine just like we did in Method 1, where we followed the steps of installing Wine on a Debian system. Execute the commands below:

sudo apt update
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update 
sudo apt install wine

install Wine

Step 2. Install Winetricks

Winetricks is a script that downloads and installs various runtime libraries required by Wine applications. Unfortunately, the command sudo apt install winetricks doesn’t work on ChromeOS, and to solve that, we will download the script and install it manually. Execute the commands below.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks
sudo cp winetricks /usr/bin/

Install winetricks

Step 3. Install lol-wine

lol-wine includes some specific patches required to install and run League of Legends (LoL) on Linux. Execute the commands below to install lol-wine on your Chromebook.

wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb
wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol_5.18-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wine-lol_5.18-1_i386.deb

Install lol-wine

Step 4. Download and Build the Installation Script (Helper Program)

We will not download the League of Legends Windows setup file with this method. Instead, we will use a script written by Timofey Titovets (Nefelim4ag), which automates the whole process of downloading and installing League of Legends on a Linux system. Execute the command below.

git clone https://github.com/kyechou/leagueoflegends.git
cd leagueoflegends
make install

Tip: If you encounter the error “make command not found” when running the make install command, execute the command below to install the GCC compiler on your system.

sudo apt install build-essential

Install build-essential

Step 5. Install League of Legends

With everything set up, we can now install League of Legends. It’s pretty easy. Execute the command below.

leagueoflegends install

When executing this command for the first time, it will perform several Wine configurations before displaying a prompt to select your region. You can choose a region by entering the number next to it and pressing Enter. For example, we will type 1 to set our current region as North America.

Select Region

Tip: If you get the error “warning: Cannot find cabextract,” run the command below to install the package.

sudo apt install cabextract

Install cabextract

After successfully configuring your region, the League of Legends installation screen will pop up. Click the Install button as shown in the image below.

Install League of Legends

Once the installation is complete, you can launch the game from the applications menu in the “Linux Apps” section, as shown in the image below.

Linux Apps

Additionally, you can launch it from the Terminal by executing the command below inside the Helper Program we downloaded in Step 4.

leagueoflegends start

Start League of Legends