Play Half-Life and other Steam games with Wine

Posted byTim 11 Comments on Play Half-Life and other Steam games with Wine

Wine is a compatability layer for running Windows software on Linux. Of course, reimplimenting the whole Windows API is a very ambitious task and Wine is not able to run every software perfectly, if at all.

A good example of software that does run reasonably well is Steam and the Half-Life series with their expansions and the famous Counter-Strike modification.

To play those games, go to the Steam Website, download the installer and open it with wine.

The installer should be self explanatory and after the installation there should even be a Steam launcher on the desktop. You can run Steam from there and everything should work like it would using Windows.

Games I can confirm to work are Half-Life and the expansion packs Blue Shift and Opposing Force, but Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike (original and Source versions) are said to work, too.

Here is a screenshot of my Steam installation after I entered the serial number of my Half-Life Platinum Pack:

If Steam works fine but it freezes after starting a game you probably have to switch from the ALSA to the OSS driver in your Wine configuration. This can easily be done with the ‘winecfg’ utility. It should work fine if the Audio setup looks like this:

If you have any problems feel free to ask in the forums or post a comment.

Otherwise, Have fun gaming

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11 Comments

  1. You forget to mention that people need to get ‘tahoma.ttf’ from somewhere and put it in their virtual c:\windows\fonts.

    That would be:
    “~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts”

    Anyways, you want to google for this file and put it in there. Otherwise you can’t read any of the text in steam or half-life.

    ALso you want to disable alsa. It will work otherwise, but OSS seems much more responsive.

    All the games, Hl2, CS, HL2:Ep1, HL1, and the 10 mods I tried all seem to work.

    Sin also works by the way. But other steam games are not garantueed to work, unless they are based on the source engine. (like the HL2 mods).

    The loading of steam is slower, the running of the games faster. Weird, but true.

  2. i cant install steam trough wine… steam is a msi application.. i need an exe..can u help?

  4. I can’t believe I formatted from Ubuntu, back to XP just because I couldnt find a way to get this to work.. And now I’ve found it 😀

    Thank you so much!!

  5. I believe most Valve games are built on the Source game engine. Half Life 2 is built on the source engine, so expansions and mods to it should work also. If I am correct in my theory, Team Fortress 2 should work aswell.

    I read on Digg recently that the source engine is going to be ported to Linux “soon”.

  6. Ok, so once you install steam, how do you install the games? will steam try to run it in your native OS or in Wine?

  7. Ok, I’ve encountered a few problems. One, my game (Half-Life) just won’t start up. I downloaded steam and the game, and yet whenever I try to open the game nothing happens. No half-life.exe on the system monitor, nothing. did I miss something important?

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