Installing Valve’s STEAM and Counterstrike on Ubuntu

This is only my experience downloading and installing Steam and Valve games like Counterstrike 1.6 and TFC on Linux. Your experience may vary.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A purchased copy of Half Life Platinum (if you’re into the old versions of Counter Strike and Team Fortress Classic – still going strong with thousands of gamers on 24/7) and/or a purchased copy of Half Life 2. You won’t have to use the DVD/CDs in this tutorial (in fact I’ve never gotten them to work), you’ll just need the product key. Steam includes a lovely little downloader for Valve games
• Wine:
  • sudo apt-get install wine
• Once Wine is installed, extract the fonts from this archive to the ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ directory. If you don’t, you’ll notice Steam and its games don’t have any text!
• Download and run the SteamInstall.exe file (NOT the .msi that’s on their download page). From a terminal:
  • cd ~/Desktop
  • wget http://steampowered.com/download/SteamInstall.exe
  • wine SteamInstall.exe -dxlevel 90 -novid

This will guide you through a small install process. Once completed, edit the shortcut (or create one if one wasn’t automatically created for you):

Right-click on Applications menu -> Edit Menus -> Wine -> Programs -> Steam -> Steam, right-click “Steam” and change the properties “command” to:

wine “C:/Program Files/Steam/steam.exe” -dxlevel 90 -novid -width 1024 -height 768 -heapsize 512000

There you go! If you have a steam account by purchasing a copy of Half Life, you can log in and use the interface to download whichever games you’ve purchased.