Steam under Linux

This should become a comprehensive guide to install and use Steam under a Linux environment. At least it should prove usable as one as long as Valve doesn't release a real Linux Steam client.

TODO: Add a guide to get Steam running and additional information

Step 1: Setting up Wine

First of all you have to set up a working Wine installation.

Installing Wine

TODO: Add install guides for other popular distributions

Gentoo

Install Wine with emerge wine. In order to get the most recent Wine version you have to put app-emulation/wine ~{arch}. Replace {arch} with the architecture of your linux installation, e.g. x86 or amd64. (This step maybe has to be done for possible dependencies as well.)

Other distributions / manual installation

There are packages for several other linux distributions and a source tarball available on the official download page.

Installing required fonts

Steam uses the font Tahoma which is included in all Windows versions, but is not available on Linux. This will result in invisible text when running Steam without installing Tahoma first.

The easiest way to work around this issue is to put a copy of tahoma.ttf from a Windows installation (%WINDIR%\Fonts) to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts.

Step 2: Installing Steam

Download the installer, open a terminal and change to the download directory. Run wine SteamInstall.exe and follow the instructions. After that Steam is installed in Wine's "virtual" Windows drive, usually ~/.wine/drive_c/Programs/Valve/Steam.

Note:The login window doesn't have keyboard focus when starting up. You have to right-click into the login field first.

Known Issues

Minimizing Steam

Minimizing Steam causes the X server to ignore your mouse / keyboard input. Don't minimize Steam to work around this issue, instead close the window and open it with the Wine Systray. If you accidently minimize Steam you either have to restart the X server / computer or you can log-in from another computer (e.g. SSH) and kill steam.exe processes.

Wine, Steam & ntfs-3g

ntfs-3g is a powerful user-mode driver for Linux which is capable of almost all file operations on NTFS partitions. Sadly, ntfs-3g and/or Wine are currently unable to work with a NTFS-based installation of Steam. Steam will crash with the following error:

Steam.exe (main exception): Cannot open blob archive file: CMultiFieldBlob(mem-mapped file): Failed to MapViewOfFile

Creating a Symlink to SteamApps on a NTFS partition doesn't work either. Steam will start up, but your GCFs will get corrupted or - if you're lucky - Steam only assumes they are corrupted. So you won't get around having duplicate GCFs for Linux and Windows if you plan on using Steam with both operating systems and having NTFS partitions for Windows.

See also

• Wine HQ (official Wine homepage)
• linuX-gamers.net guide
• TransGaming Inc. (home of Cedega - also known as WineX)