First, you need to install Steam off your DVD. After Steam is installed, run it. If you don't see any of the fonts, close down steam and open up a terminal; cd to ~/.wine; vi or otherwise edit the system.reg file; under the heading
[Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes], add the following line:
"Tahoma"="Times New Roman"Restart Steam. You should see the fonts now; if not go back and retry the previous step. Log in if you have an existing account; otherwise, create an account. Go to "My Games"; if you installed with the DVD, you'll have Half-Life 2 listed as available but not yet installed. Right click where it says "Half-Life 2"; a small pop-up menu will appear; click on install. This is an easier method than installing directly from the DVD; the downside of this method is it does take some time to download the file.
Once it's finished downloading. Make sure Steam is running before trying the next step. It should be; you can close the main Steam window if desired, which should result in a pop up message telling you that Steam will still be docked in the taskbar; this is ok. Bring up a terminal, cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps//half-life 2
In this directory, you'll find an executable file, hl2.exe, run this by typing "wine hl2.exe" on the command line. If everything goes well, Half-Life 2 will soon start up. Note: always run Half-Life 2 this way. You must run Steam separately from running the hl2.exe file; if you try to run Half-Life 2 through the Steam application directly by clicking the "Launch Game" button, you're more than likely to run into errors (I've never been able to get this to work on two different operating systems with two different hardware setups; let me know if you have gotten it to work).
Some common problems can result. If you have no sound or choppy sound, go into your winecfg (first, make sure you have libjack.so installed), go to the audo tab and make sure that OSS is unchecked and that ASLA and JACK are checked; you may also want to change Hardware Acceleration to emulation; I had to do this on one system. Try running Half-Life 2 again. Sometimes, it's necessary to restart the X server by typing CTRL+BACKSPACE before attempting to start up HL2 again after making the winecfg (I have no idea why.)
If you can't get Steam or HL2 to install because you get a message saying that your OS is not supported, bring up winecfg and change the Windows combo box to read Windows XP; Steam recently stopped supporting Win98, which Wine still defaults to.
If you can't install Steam because of a missing msi executable; you'll first need to install the msi program.
Hope this helps.
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