hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1594.txt

Episode: 1594
Title: HPR1594: Steam and wine with linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1594/hpr1594.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:35:39

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It's Thursday 11th on September 2014.
This is an HDR episode 1,594 entitled, Steam and Wine with Linux.
It is hosted by Andrew Conway and is about 20 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to alumc at email.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is how to coach a Windows-only Steam game to work under Steam in GNU slash Linux.
This episode of HDR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Hello, this is Andrew, also known as McNalloo.
And on this HBR show I'm not going to talk about astronomy, nor am I going to talk about
touch jam and there's no care if you're with me.
I'm going to talk about an experience I just had helping my son play his favourite game
on Linux.
So the gaming question is called Ace of Spades and for those of you that don't know it's
kind of a, it's like Minecraft combined with Team Fortress.
So the idea is you build, it's blocky like Minecraft and you can build stuff like Minecraft
but you go around shooting people which is not really what Minecraft is all about.
And it's quite a strange history, originally started off as a free-to-play game by a cemented
indie developer and a cult following and then it was kind of swalled up in some way by
a bigger games publisher called Jagex, Jagex and at that point only became available through
Steam.
Now I used to be able to get it to work in its pre-Steam days using wine fairly straightforwardly,
it was a very simple program and very light in graphics requirements but the new version
is only available through Steam and sadly there's no Linux version.
So although Steam has done a great job of catering for us Linux people in realising
that Windows is not so good, Jagex have not made this game available in Linux.
Anyway, now the problem was that my son usually uses a computer and he has done since he's
a tiny real-add, he's now nine but since we were three or four, maybe even younger, he's
been used to using one of my computers, a desktop computer that has Slackware with KDE
or a three doesn't bat and I played about it and in fact the dual boots to Windows because
I originally did use it for work sometimes, who didn't do Windows XP long ago.
But he was perfectly happy doing the various things that he does which is watching YouTube,
writing documents using Libra Office, discerthing their web, listening to music and so
forth, he's quite happy doing all of that with Firefox and KDE and other things.
But when the new ASUS Bades came out, we had to install Steam in the Windows XP operating
system that was also on the disk and so we would have to reboot the machine.
Now the amusing thing is that I think in order to try and nag myself into getting rid
of Windows at some point, I'd renamed it in the boot up menu that's LILO because I'm
using Slackware, I just use LILO simple, instead of calling it WinXP, I changed it to
PhelixP in an attempt to get me, reminding me to get rid of it soon.
And ironically my son has never learned to call it Windows XP, he does refer to it without
any irony as PhelixP because that's what he's used to selecting at the LILO boot prompt.
Anyway, as far as he's concerned, it's just a way to get into Steam and Play ASUS Bades,
that's only his near-views Windows.
Of course, coming April of 2014, I said to him, sorry son, Windows XP is no longer a good
idea, it's not getting booted up into that mode anymore and ASUS Bades is no line game
and I couldn't even keep letting him use Windows XP with no network connection because
ASUS Bades just wouldn't work.
So he accepted the explanation I gave him as to why Windows XP or PhelixP had to be
been, and that was that, but I did promise him that I would find a way to get ASUS Bades
working for a new game, and through to my word I've done that, but it wasn't easy.
So I wasn't going to install Windows 7, I don't actually have a valid installer for
Windows 7 in order I tend to get one, so that ruled out virtual machines as well.
And I was left then with running Steam under Wine in Linux and hoping that somehow that
would let me run and play ASUS Bades.
So what I did was I went to Wine HQ and I checked and found that Steam is mostly called
created, which in Wine HQ means that most games and Steam will work, and I installed
Wine.
Now, what people would use the package managers do this, but I managed to pull the package
to be built package for Slackware from Alien Bob's website.
The Alien Bob is one of the key contributors to Slackware, there's only one official
Slackware maintainer, a battery vocating, but if there's a number 2 or a number 3 designated
then Alien Bob would certainly be either 2 or 3.
Anyway, so I got the package for Wine, now it's a 64-bit Wine, and that's important
because I'm running a 64-bit edition of Slackware, but that doesn't make any difference
to what Wine does, it runs 32-bit Windows binaries, which is just as well because the Steam
client for Windows is only 32-bit.
So that was good, as it happens I do actually have the capability to run 32-bit programs
on my Slackware installation, again thanks to the Venerable Alien Bob, I installed 32
-bit libraries, so if I need to I can run 32-bit, but it doesn't matter, Wine does 64-bit
application, and despite it being 64-bit it quite happily runs 32-bit Windows applications.
A subtlety which actually will come back to in a minute later in this story, but it's
important to get your hair on that I feel so you can understand what Wine is doing.
So next, from the Wine HQ page I clicked on the download button and I got steaminstall.msi
on the Steam website, it's called Steam Power to Go to Call, anyway, and then I read a bit
of instructions on Wine and decided that Wine, Space, MSI, Exec, Slash, I, Steam Install,
MSI, I think that's correct, I'll put it in the show notes, and that ran the Steam installer
of some fairly ugly Windows, but it all worked, and I installed Steam, and I was able
to launch Steam just fine after that, now the first problem was a pretty serious one
in that I could see the Windows, and these were much prettier by the way than the dialogue
Windows I'd seen earlier, but they had blank space where all the text was, in other words
all the text was invisible, a quick check in the Wine HQ site revealed that this is
a known problem, and you have to add the command line switch, hyphen, no hyphen, de-write,
I think, to the Wine command when you're launching Steam, and then it'll come up and you'll
see all the text.
Now once it did that, I was wrapped up taking it back to discover that Steam never before
installed in this operating system knew my name, it was McNailu, now that's not my
username on that machine, actually I was even logged in, and my own username was logged
into my son's username, and I thought where did it get me going from, and my only thought
was that it recognized my Mac at address and Steam picked up from its own databases.
This is a little bit creepy, but I know that does this kind of stuff, so it's a price
to be for a fire working with Steam.
Anyway, so I then tried to launch install ASUS speeds, and that caused it to install, which
seemed to go fine, but it didn't launch, it just gave nothing happened in the graphic
user interface, and in the terminal window where I'd launched it, I could see that it
was giving some completely inscrutable one line error message, which was, well, no help
to me, and so generic that it didn't offer any help when I searched online.
I did a more reading online, and I discovered that people had more success if they used a script
to call the Winetrix, that's Winetrix all onward.
Now, Winetrix is just a, I think it's a Perl script, and you can just download it and
run it, but I installed it using something in Slack, which also highlighted to me that
I needed a utility called Kabe Extract, a deal with extracting Windows Cab files.
Anyway, so I did that, I got Winetrix, and the Winetrix
command, I could just, I had installed globally in user bin, so I could, I discovered that
all I had to do was, oh, before I get to that, first of all, uninstalled steam that I
just installed, just by running the installer in the exact same way, and clicking remove
in the dialog, so I did that first.
And then I turned to Winetrix, and I just typed in the command line, Winetrix Space Steam,
and built into this script as a method that will install and configure Steam for you.
Now, the first thing it did was go off and download the Steam install.msi that I had
downloaded manually, but it then complained that the SHA1 sum, the checksum, did not match.
I tried it again, it happened exactly the same as the first time, so I checked the script
and to my surprise, I found that inside the Winetrix script, I mean, you can just,
it's just a parallel script, it takes values, look at it.
If you search for, I think, the line that has steam powered in it, you'll find that
not only does it specify the URL for downloading, but hard coded into the script is the SHA1 sum
for Steam's old MSI.
The problem is, the command in the script tells me that this was done in the 18th of March,
2011, and it's over three years later, so it's not surprising that the checksum no longer
matches.
So all I did was download the file, and manually, from the link, it was using, not the link
I used before I should add, but the link that was provided inside the Winetrix script,
within SHA1 sum on that, I then copied and pasted that into the Winetrix script, so that
it would use this new SHA1 sum.
Now, this affords no-wheel protection other than that the two downloads were the same,
somebody's tampered with it, then I'm still vulnerable, but you take your chances.
Anyway, I did this, and Winetrix, space, steam and the command line, and this is just
as a regular user, I should say, and an install process for Steam happened all over again,
except it was different.
It was a different set of dialogue windows, asked me a few more questions, and this time
it didn't creepily identify me as McNalloo, don't know why, but it didn't, but it gave
me quite a lot of hope that I was doing something different this time, and indeed Steam afterwards
launched, just fine, installed, a space just fine, and when I click play it didn't work,
it didn't work, but again, heartening me in my progress, I could see that it was a
big splurge of error message on an internal window where I had launched it, and this time
I could read it, and after a little bit of reading I decided that, oh, it's looking
for openal.so.something other, it's a shared library, openal is for audio, I know Steam
uses that, and my guess was that it was looking for the 32-bit version of that library, even
though it's a 64-bit wine, I think, somehow it was trying to link up the 32, but Windows
requirement for a DLL for openal to a 32-bit Linux one, I didn't have a 32-bit libopenal.so.plava
bar on my system, and now the reason is because openal is not part of standard Slackware, it's
quite unusual, I actually wish it was part of standard Slackware, it's not that big, but it's
quite unusual to come across this kind of dependency problem in Slackware, now as a
happens for other reasons, I've already installed openal, but only the 64-bit version,
and so what I did was I went off to Alien Bob site, and I'll put the link in the show notes,
and I downloaded the 32-bit package for openal, and then used one of his multi-lib scripts,
just one line to convert it to a 32-bit package, which would install into user lib,
whereas the previous 64-bit openal library was installed in user lib64, and after I did that,
installed that package, then I could launch use speeds, and it played just fine, and my son was
within minutes playing it, just like he did when he used to play on Phil XP, and was perfectly happy,
well he wasn't happy for that long, because he's going good at As of Spades, and he was kicked off
the server for cheating, but actually he isn't cheating, he's just very good at As of Spades,
I dared even try and play it with him, because he just, well you just shoot me dead, that's the
thanks you get for being a father of course, being shot by your son after you've spent
best part of two hours installing a game for him, oh well I hope that you found that
of interest, I'll put all the links in the show notes, and everything I've just said, I'll probably
write in a blog post as well, which is going my own blog, which I'll give a link to,
anyway catch you next time, and a big thank you to all the folks out there in ATPR and all
other interesting shows, bye bye!
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