Installing Half-Life 2 on Linux
Here are some tips on getting HL2 installed on Linux.
1 - You need Cedega 4.2 from Transgaming. Standard WINE won’t cut it because of the CD protection enforced by the publisher.
2 - HL2 will install into the Steam directory. I had to reinstall twice because of this; remember that installers don’t understand symlinks. I ended up making an entry in my config file that pointed a Windows drive to a big partition.
3 - The CD-based installer locks the drive, preventing you from swapping disks (at least on some machines, may depend on your CDROM model). After several false starts, I copied CD1 to the hard drive and ran setup from there. It still pulled everything off the CD, but I was able to swap discs without a problem.
4 - The whole registration process is a pain. Be prepared for some very long waits and a few failures. I understand that after the content is decrypted there is a way to play in offline mode, but dang if I can find it.
5 - There appear to be problems with the 2.6.9 kernel. Be prepared to roll back to 2.6.8 or forward to 2.6.10 if necessary.
Number of installs before success: 6. Not a stellar success story. However, it *did* work in the end, which is the most important bit.
Of course, the machine did not reboot successfully after running the game, but I’m fairly certain that’s because the nvidia driver needs updating.