How to install Counter Strike in Linux

CounterStrike and all mods based on Half-Life (1 or 2) are one of the most played games ever but, unfortunately, are designed for Windows and no Linux version has been developed so far. A lot of Linux users have saved a Windows partition just to boot from it when they feel like playing a game. What if that won't be necessary anymore? What if you could run your favorite games directly for Linux? This is what we are trying to do with this article. First of all, I should warn you that this method isn't official, nor does it guarantee a successful installation and run.

As you probably already know, there is a Wine-based Linux software that was designed to run Windows games in Linux. It's called "Cedega" and it costs money, which is a problem for many Open Source fans. In this guide, I'm going to use Wine, which is a free program that implements Windows software on Linux. Enough said, let's begin.

First of all, make sure your ATi or nVIDIA drivers are properly installed; otherwise, you will only get around 10 fps in the games, which you probably wouldn't want to happen.

Installing Wine

Wine can be installed using one of the guides specific for your distribution that can be found here. If you run Fedora Core, simply execute this command as root:

# yum install wine

or

You can compile the latest source yourself by using the WineCVS.sh that can be downloaded from here. Simply, after download, run it from a root terminal:

# sh WineCVS.sh

Select a profile, follow the steps and with a little luck, you will have the latest version of wine installed and ready.

Now, run wine with any small windows program (putty.exe for instance).

# wine putty.exe

When wine is run for the first time, it creates all necessary directories, including your fake C: drive, which is per default located in ~/.wine/drive_c.

Note: Steam requires font "tahoma" to be available in order to show the text in Steam and in the game, so either you follow the guide here to install Microsoft core fonts, or simply search for the font on Google, download it and save it into your ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts directory.

Installing Steam

Simply download the SteamInstall.exe application, change the directory to where you downloaded it and run it with wine:

# wine SteamInstall.exe

It might take a lot of time to update itself, depending on your connection type. However, it might crash while updating with a "Sharing violation" error. To repair this, run the following command in the console:

# wine SteamTmp.exe SelfUpdate "/root/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/Steam.exe" 14
(substitute the path to steam executables with your path).

Don't update any games for now. When you are sure Steam runs without any problems, close it and start it again with:

#WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine Steam.exe

This command will suppress all FIXME errors that Wine is printing in the console while running in the normal mode. This way, all the games will run a lot faster.

Now, it's time to login with your account. If you can't type anything in the Login and Password fields, simply right-click one of the fields and then left click it again to make the cut, copy, paste etc menu disappear.

Now, in order to run CS1.6, the easiest way is to create a .sh script which you'll be running from the console. Open your favorite text editor, paste these lines and save the script as, for instance, playcs.sh:

#!/bin/bash
WINEDEBUG=fixme-all wine C:/Program Files/Steam/Steam.exe -fullscreen
-width 1280 -height 1024 -applaunch 10
-heapsize 512000 +map_background none "$@"

Of course, you should edit the command line options to suit your system. For example, set the -width and -height to your desktop's resolution. Next, set the -heapsize to half your computer's RAM amount. If you have 1GB of RAM, it's safe to leave 512000, otherwise modify that value. Through the applaunch command option, you can choose what game Steam should run. These all are few of the available options:

Half-Life Mods:

cstrike - applaunch 10
tfc - applaunch 20
dod - applaunch 30
dmc - applaunch 40
op4 - applaunch 50
ricochet - applaunch 60
valve - applaunch 70
czero - applaunch 80

Half-Life 2 Mods:

cstrike - applaunch 240
dod - applaunch 300
hl2mp - applaunch 320

There are still a large number of bugs that need to be fixed in order for Windows games launched on Linux to run smoothly and flawlessly. For instance, try not to minimize the Steam window as it will probably freeze your desktop environment. Good luck!