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.


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