Don't wait for Valve, install Steam on Ubuntu now

We reported recently that Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that they would be moving both the Steam software and their games to Linux. Some games may already be playable thanks to some software called Wine that lets you run Windows programs on. We got both Steam and the fun game Dungeons of Dredmor to install without any difficulty on Ubuntu.

Read more: Ubuntu blogs

Wine is not installed with Ubuntu, so click on the Ubuntu Software Store icon in the left hand column. Click in the search text box on the right hand side of the Store and type wine.

Click on the Wine entry that has an icon of a wine glass and then click on Install. Enter your password when prompted and press enter. There is only one other step, which is to agree to the terms of use for the Microsoft Core Font. Close the Software Store once Wine has finished installing.

Start Firefox and go to www.steampowered.com. Click on the green icon in the top right hand corner of the web page to download the Steam software. It's the Windows version that we want to install. Click on the green button in the next page. Make sure that Firefox will open the download with Wine and proceed with the download.

When it has downloaded the Steam installation program will run as if it was on Windows. Follow the wizard with all the default settings. Don't worry that the folder is named using the Windows convention rather than that of Ubuntu, Wine handles all of that in the background.

Once it has finished the Steam client should start automatically. Click on the option to log in with an existing account. Enter your user name and password and select the option to remember your details.

As an extra level of security, Steam will email you a five digit code to enter into the Steam client. Copy this code from the email into the client and click on Next.

The Steam client will probably update itself and then you will see the familiar interface from Windows.

We decided to try Dungeons of Dredmor, partly because we think it's a lot of fun but mostly because it is undemanding and so should work without any problems on Wine. Select the game in your library and click on Install. Steam will download all the files for the game including your save files.

Click on Play when the download has completed and the game should play as normal.

Just because Dungeons of Dredmor worked, doesn't mean that every Steam game will. More demanding 3D games may not work that well and these are the kind of games that the Valve Linux team has been focusing on. You can read their progress on the Valve Linux blog.