Steam in Wine update or package? [closed]

Question

I'm not sure how to title the question so please excuse the title if I have entered a misleading title. First off, I recently bought Portal 1&2 in Steam. I was able to open Steam in Wine (don't know why but Steam for Linux is all messed up, everything looks off and says "Not avalivle in your country" or something.) no troubles at all. However after beating Portal I wanted to play Portal 2 and this is where my troubles start.

I have seen videos of others playing Portal 2 just fine in Linux but most of them are older versions. I'm running, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS because i thought it would be better than the other option i had to download Ubuntu when i fist made the switch from Windows Vista and 7.

When I click 'Play' a menu pops up and says: "Completing installation ... 1%"

after waiting a bit the percentage does not change but the window closes and another pops up and says: "In order to run Steam properly on this version of Windows, the Steam service component must be installed. The service installation process requires administrator privileges."

Sadly even trying to click on 'INSTALL SERVICE' the window wont go away unless i click the install button about 10 times (yes i have clicked once and waited. nothing happens and it stays on my screen as if i never touched it.) before it finally goes away.

After than nothing happens, if i click on 'Play' again Steam will crash or prompt me to restart in order to finalize the changes. After it starts up again it repeats itself.

After 2 days of trying and looking up information I finally decided to just ask if anyone can help me or tell me to give up and find a way to install Windows on my computer again.

Answer 1

First of all, many games still aren't ported to Steam for Linux, so it's likely saying "cannot play game"-type errors because they haven't been ported yet. I know for a fact that Portal is ported yet.

That being said, have you looked at the WineHQ page for Portal 2 on Steam? Running 12.04 and wine 1.5.8, it got a platinum rating, but there are certain dlls you must and must not have installed.

On the (almost) latest version of wine, 1.5.19, it got a gold rating, and didn't mention any specific dlls necessary for installation.

They both also need a registry entry added to install.

Don't know if that answers what you were asking, but checking that out may help.

EDIT: A little warning - wine 1.5.20 currently seems to have broken many games under wine, so I would suggest not using that version, since it probably won't work. If you do, I would make a backup of the 1.5.19 .debs, so you can force a downgrade later.