Druid is perfect as a starter class, especially if you don't want to go to dungeons, where the druid loses some of its abilities. It's a primarily outdoor class really. Perfect to explore the game.
Monk if you don't want to deal with the whole spell casting system of EQ which isn't particularly straightforward.
As for Linux - I play P99 on Linux. Installation is very simple. I use Debian linux but it should work for other distros as well, especially Ubuntu since it's so close to Debian in many ways.
You'll simply need to
- install wine, any version 4 or higher should work without any tweaking. On Debian (and probably Ubuntu) you need to run "sudo apt install wine wine32" to install wine.
- run winecfg once, don't need to change anything. It will create some directories.
- Copy your P99 installation folder to /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Users/<username>/p99
- optional: Symlink the directory for easy access: ln -s /home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Users/<username>/p99 /home/<username>/p99
- Create the following file with the text editor of your choice:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Users/<username>/p99
wine ./eqgame.exe patchme
- make the file executable by running "chmod +x <filename>" on it
- run this file every time you want to run p99
No idea how used to Linux you are, so I gave a detailed walkthrough.