Ubuntu and Steam
So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:
- Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
- Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
- Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu
Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.
Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.
Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using
sudo apt-get install wine
Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.
I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran
msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi
The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.
Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:
WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:\Program Files\Steam\steam.exe"
This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.
The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.
The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.
Thanks for this, I’ll try it out. Wouldnt mind getting Steam to work in Ubuntu!
David,
My laptop won’t drive HL2 (lacks the horse power) but for HL1 based games it works pretty well. Give it a shot, you can always remove it if it doesn’t work.
Hopefully it’ll run ok with Wine games. Got a radeon 9550 and from all the guides I’ve followed, enabling restricted drivers etc, I still can’t get compiz fusion to work or get the 3d screensavers built into ubuntu to run as fast as they would in windows. Even minimizing and maximizing windows lags ever so slightly.
My laptop runs a ATI 9800. Even with ATI’s drivers Compiz just behaves badly.
I did get some success running 1024×768 but anything higher (I default to 1400×1050) and it breaks badly.