Installing Games in Steam

I recently noticed Wine had updated (1.1.12), so I thought I might check it out. There was a  free Peggle Extreme game offered as one of the promotions as I logged into Steam, so I thought I would check it out.

Read this posting because you end up with a free game at the end! :)

Wine Working!

The past

One of my first posts was about getting Team Fortress 2 working – at that time I was unable to get Wine installed at all, but was successful with Crossover.

Well, a few days ago, I was able to install the latest version of Wine  (0.9.51), and – once Wine installed – Steam and Team Fortress 2 installed just  fine!

I wish I could tell you exactly what I did differently this time compared to the other times, but I don’t know. I must have tried to install Wine at least a dozen times, often trying various tweaks I found on the web.

The Present

One of the reasons I wanted to try to install the latest version of Wine was I hoped that the support would be better – and there are two big areas that were affected:

1. Microphone input works now. This is a very nice change.

2. Sadly, TF2 no longer shows Asian fonts. Instead, I see the “>” character. This is annoying, because although you can identify the players by avatar, you can’t refer to them in chat because you don’t know their handle!

I haven’t tried real hard to fix this – I did copy over the Tahoma fonts from Windows XP, but that did not help (although they look better than the Tahoma that was there.)

Outside of that, all fonts are very readable, which was not true under Crossover. Also, I can run full-screen and with high textures (which I had a bit of a problem doing before as well.)

Team Fortress 2

Fun is a requirement

One of my personal requirements going into this thing is that I want to be able to play some good games in Ubuntu. (I do not want to dual-boot.)

The game I am currently playing (or trying to play if the bastards would stop shooting me) is Team Fortress 2. I’m not a big gamer, I usually play one game at a time seriously until I get tired of it, and it just so happens that TF2 is what I currently like, so if this thing is going to work, I need to be able to run it in Ubuntu.

But Mom! Everyone else is doing it!

A quick look on YouTube might make you think it’s a piece of cake to get TF2 up and running in Ubuntu. I grabbed Wine and started its installation procedure. Here is what happened:

jason@apollo: ~$ install-wine-please
 no

Actually, I kept getting a “segmentation fault” and couldn’t get anywhere at all. I did notice that some other things would cause the same error, so I began to suspect the problem was not solely with wine. For some reason, I thought it might be the video card drivers again, so after a lot of hassle this is what happened:

I used envy to install the latest non-beta driver, and then I re-installed the latest beta driver. After this, I was able to get Steam installed, but I could not log in.

(I could never get the “wine iexplore http://anything to work”, so I was pretty sure the installation was not fully successful, even though “wine notepad” would work.)

Step aside ma’am: I am a professional

One of the things I tried earlier was Crossover, but it kept saying wine was giving errors. Now, though I thought I would give it a new try and … biggity-bam-boom it worked!

Steam fired right up and I began installing the games. A short time (many many hours of downloading later) and I was playing Team Fortress 2 in a 1680×1050 window and it runs smooth as butter.

No one is perfect

The results are not 100%: the biggest problems being that the microphone won’t work, the fonts in the server browser are very hard to read, and the Steam community overlay doesn’t work at all.

I must say I am a bit disappointed I couldn’t get wine to work. For one thing you have to pay for Crossover (it has a 30-day trial which I am on right now), and for another thing, it is my understanding that the newer versions of wine have better support. I may wait a week or two and give wine another try – if not I will likely pony up the cash for Crossover.

The Bottom Line

Me, a total newbie to Ubuntu went from a brand new machine with no OS, to pwning n00bs in about a day and a half. The game, though not 100% the same as in Windows, is still 100% playable and fun. I’m ushimitsudoki on Steam as well, so bring it!

Next post: New box, new keys.