I was rummaging through my drawers the other day and came across an
ATI Rage XL that was hidden away. I have a spare machine for Userful work, and it had a multiheaded
colorgraphics card in it. Since I am no longer doing multiheaded stuff
specifically, I threw that Rage XL in. Wow! It is much, much faster!
So I decided to see if I could get some games working. So I
installed Half-life, and then I installed Valve's Steam thing, which
is used to distribute updates and stuff (among other things). It works
great in Windows... hmmm, can I make it work in WineX (a.k.a. Cedega?)?
There's an installation
script and howto available from linux-gamers.net which makes
the CVS version of WineX easy to install. I was under the impression
that one had to install IE6 to get Steam to work, however...
I installed DCOM98,
because that's commonly needed for IE6 installation (and
InstallShield, a common game packaging system). But I could not get
IE6 to install in any way. I always crashed out before showing a
window. So I decided to just try installing Steam. The install went
ok, but Steam itself would not run.
I looked through the output of cvscedega Steam.exe, and
noticed a missing dll (msvcr70.dll), so I downloaded that from dll-file.com,
and ran it again. Then I saw something that absolutely amazed me:
err:shdocvw:SHDOCVW_TryLoadMozillaControl Can't load the Mozilla ActiveX control
It turns out that this guy wrote
a Mozilla ActiveX control. The fact that a fairly major app took the
time to optionally make use of it when it was unable to find IE's
ActiveX control was even more amazing. So I downloaded and installed
it. I had to get another dll, msvcp70.dll,
but after that it worked, aside from missing fonts. That was quickly
solved by copying ttf files from my Windows installation and following
the Fedora Core 3 Release Notes regarding fonts. The last thing was to
turn on FreeType support in the config file.
So now I have a working Steam installation on a Fedora Core 3
machine. Now I'll just wait to see if the games themselves work
ok... they should though. I've had Half-Life and Counter-Strike (and
Day of Defeat, etc) working under WineX before.
A nice touch is that the Steam system tray icon appears in the Gnome Notification area on the panel.
Nifty!
