LinuxQuestions.org - Half Life 1 - Steam Version

Ok, this is kind of along the same lines as my WoW in wine topic, kind of a how I did it record. This one will be quite a bit shorter, :P.

I cannot vouch for installing the game. I tried installing it a long time ago and failed because the Steam installer didn't look or operate right, but that of course was also on an older version of wine without my nvidia patch, so if you've installed wine according to my WoW walkthrough, it might work, but I won't promise you anything. I would think it would because to me Steam looks fine and runs with no hitches, whereas before it looked like crap. Anyway, what I did was just copy the "Steam" directory from my Windows hard drive into my '.wine/drive_c/program files' folder. Whenever you do this, sometimes you do not have permission to write to the files, and therefore, downloading new maps and saving your game is not possible. To fix this, after copying the folder, if you choose to get the game this way, run these commands as root, inserting the appropriate information such as your username and home folder:

Code:

chown yourusername yourhomefolder --recursive

Code:

chgrp yourusername yourhomefolder --recursive

Code:

chmod u+rwx yourhomefolder --recursive

Now, by default Steam looked and operated fine, but it didn't want to move behind Half Life when the game started, so to launch the game directly like windows does, you can make a launcher on your desktop, your games menu, or wherever. The command the launcher should execute is as follows. If you put Half Life in a folder other than your wine folder, please change it accordingly.

Code:

wine "C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 70

C:\ works because to wine, C:\ points to $HOME/.wine/drive_c, but if it's say just in your home directory, replacing that with '/home/yourusername/Steam' will work fine as well. The above command can also be ran directly from the command line, if you wish to do so for whatever reason. If you get an error about a certain area of the registry being in use, don't worry, just restart the game and let it re-load. For me, it works perfect, no glitches "anywhere" in the sound, graphics or anything. However I have noticed it doesn't like to die if you try offering it "KILL" signals from your process viewer, so don't do that unless it's absolutely necessary. I would advise exiting the game normally, then right clicking the Steam icon in your system tray and clicking exit on that. For optimum performance, you may wish to, before starting a game, go into your options and set the Graphics to "OpenGL", and not "Software" or "D3D". OpenGL is native to Linux, and by using it you may avoid some issues that may come from letting Wine try to emulate Direct3D.

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