Getting Half-Life 2 on Steam in Linux

After getting a brand new beast of a laptop (G73SW) and installing it with Fedora 14 x86_64, I wanted to play a game of two using my Steam account. After all, I you have a gaming laptop, what good is it if you don't game.After checking to see if Half-Life 2 works on Wine using WineHQ AppDB. I set out to get it working.

After two nights of messing around with wine, I finally got it two work. Here are some of my notes and observation.

Wine x86_64 isn't mature enough to run games from Steam. Firstly, audio doesn't work. Half Life 2 doesn't seem to start if audio isn't working.

So you need to uninstall all wine x86_64 packages. Then install i686 version of wine:

yum install wine-small-fonts wine-jack.i686 wine-system-fonts \
wine-ldap.i686 wine.i686 wine-common wine-marlett-fonts \
wine-pulseaudio.i686 wine-fonts wine-cms.i686 wine-wow.i686 \
wine-symbol-fonts wine-openal.i686 wine-devel.i686 \
wine-core.i686 wine-desktop wine-oss.i686 wine-courier-fonts \
wine-twain.i686 wine-esd.i686 wine-tahoma-fonts wine-capi.i686 \
wine-alsa.i686 wine-ms-sans-serif-fonts

Next download the infinitely useful winetricks script and use it to install Steam, DirectX 9, corefonts, flash, vcrun2005.

The biggest thing got me stumped awhile was trying to get OpenGL to run since DirectX uses it. I finally got it to work once I discover that you need to install the 32-bit libGL.so for the NVidia Xorg drivers:

yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686

Once that was done, Half-Life 2 finally started with audio right from the Steam Library Panel. I copied over all my save games from my Windows partition, fiddled with the game settings and finally loaded a saved game.

Next up... Try restoring some of my other Steam games.