Please post here only about Steam itself. For related games please use their App DB-Entries:
Half-Life 2 | Counter-Strike: Source | Day of Defeat: Source | Team Fortress 2 | Half-Life with its Modifications | Portal­ | Left 4 Dead­

HOWTO: Installing and Running Steam

1. Install Wine 1.0.1 or newer
2. Install Gecko Engine by running ­ ­

   wine iexplore http://winehq.org
   

   If the above installation of Gecko Engine does not work please consider doing it manual.

   $ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86.cab
   $ sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/wine/gecko
   $ sudo mv wine_gecko-1.0.0-x86.cab /usr/share/wine/gecko/

   ­ Alternatively you can use winetricks:

   cd ~
   wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
   sh ./winetricks gecko
   

3. Download Steam installer from http://www.steampowered.com and run it with

   wine start SteamInstall.msi
   

   Steam should create a nice icon on your desktop that you can use to run Steam with.
4. Start steam.exe from ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/ if the installer doesn't open it automatically. You must cd to the working directory before you run it.

If you having problems logging-in or want to start a game directly see useful Steam command-line parameters.

Your steam install is now complete.

Known Bugs

• Update may crash at 26% (see Troubleshooting)
• Links (images, purchases) don't open new Window
• Won't start with no error message (completely reinstall Steam (see below)
• Missing scrollbar for embedded websites
• Steam Community In-Game does not work - disable or it will cause all games to crash

TROUBLESHOOTING

Enabling Flash and Scrollbars:

There are three ways to enable Flash and two ways to enable scrollbars in Steam. If you only wish to enable Flash and are comfortable compiling wine from source I would recommend using Jacek Caban's patch. If you wish to have Flash and scrollbars then you must use native DLL's. Note that Flash sound will not work with any of these methods but when a workaround is found it will be posted. The pro of Jacek's patch is that wine-gecko itself will support Flash on websites, the con's are that it requires compilation of  wine from source and doesn't enable scrollbars. The pro's of the native DLL methods are that they enable both Flash and scrollbars in Steam, the con's are that they don't enable Flash in wine-gecko, and in fact override wine-gecko and the DLL's must be subsequently set to builtin if you wish to use it.

Also note that any Flash version above 9r47 will not work without flickering in Steam. Therefore you must download and install that version from the Macromedia archives as described below.

1. The Patch Method

First of all you need to obtain the wine source you wish to use, apply Jacek's patch found at http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=21074, and compile and install wine. Patching and compiling wine is beyond the scope of this howto, however there are many on line howto's for these procedures so just use your favorite search engine to find them and follow their instructions. After that use the following method to install the correct Mozilla version of Flash:

cd
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp9_archive.zip
unzip fp9_archive.zip
cd fp9_archive/9r47
wine flashplayer9r47_win.exe
cd
rm -rf fp9_archive

2. Native DLL Methods

Both methods require that you install the correct ActiveX version of Flash as follows:

cd
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp9_archive.zip
unzip fp9_archive.zip
cd fp9_archive/9r47
wine flashplayer9r47_winax.exe
cd
rm -rf fp9_archive

Now there are two ways to enable Flash and the scrollbars to work. The higher performance option is to use winetricks to do a partial installation of IE6, the lower performance option is to do a full IE6 installation. In both instances IE6 is installed via winetricks, but the higher performance option doesn't load all the DLL's necessary for full standalone operation of IE6. If you're not going to use IE6 for web browsing I'd use the higher performance method. Following are instructions for both:

A. Partial IE6 Install - Higher Performance

cd
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod a+x winetricks
./winetricks ie6 corefonts fontfix gecko liberation tahoma

B. Full IE6 Install - Lower Performance

cd
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod a+x winetricks
./winetricks ie6 comctl32 comctl32.ocx corefonts fontfix gecko liberation mfc40 mfc42 msls31 
ole2 pdh riched20 riched30 tahoma urlmon wininet native_mdac

26% Bug Workaround:

Run this from the directory you installed Steam to:

nice -n 19 wine Steam.exe

If that doesn't work try this:

wine steamTmp.exe SelfUpdate "Steam.exe" 14

If all fails try this before the previous command:

rm ClientRegistry.blob

Steam can not connect to the network

Usually happens after install or an upgrade. Exit steam, remove ClientRegistry.blob from the steam's directory and restart steam.

Chat window does not work

The chat actually working but messages are not displayed correctly. Try resizing and/or minimizing/maximizing chat window.

Steam takes too long to start: (crash 1)

While starting steam actually crashing and writes a small memory dump (*.mdmp files).
To fix this add the following lines to "/etc/sysctl.conf"

# Send and receive buffer sizes to make steam happy
net.core.rmem_max = 131072
net.core.wmem_max = 131072

sysctl -p

Games don't start with message "The registry was in use by another process"

This is Steam bug due to Linux caching some file operations at the wrong time. You can fix this problem by shutting down Steam cleanly (keep running and exiting steam itself until you get a clean shutdown without any errors after "Shutting down" - watch the console you ran steam from) and then restarting it. Once steam has been shut down cleanly and restarted the error should not occur.

If all fails, start Steam, right-click on the game and select Properties. Go to Local files tab and click on Verify integrity of game cache...

Some file systems support extra sync flag. This should solve the problem. However it will reduce performance, so use with care!

chattr -R +S ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam

Steam will not work from ntfs partition mounted using ntfs-3g driver (2.6.25 kernels and older)

This is a known limitation of the driver and/or older kernels. Steam requires functionality (mmap with shared write access) which Wine can not emulate if it's not supported on file system.

To fix: use 2.6.26 or newer kernel. Or install Steam and all content into native Linux file system.

Most/all games crash immediately when loaded or after short time

Reinstalling Steam

To completely reinstall Steam without removing all your game files move "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/SteamApps" directory into safe place. Completely remove "~/.wine" directory and install Steam as shown above:

cd ~
mv ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/SteamApps ~
# install Steam here
rm -rf ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/SteamApps
mv ~/SteamApps ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam

Last edited on Sunday January 17th 2010, by Sjir Bagmeijer

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