Steam on Enterprise Linux (RedHat, CentOS, Scientific Linux)

Question

I'm using Scientific Linux 6.4 (as of now) and I'd like to figure out how I can install Steam on it so I can play my favorite game Counter-Strike ))

I head over to Steam Community :: Steam for Linux and found that Latest Steam update is broken (w/ Wine).

Is there a way to do it w/out Wine or is it my only option? How would I go about it? Please advise)

Thanks in advance.

Solution 1

Native Steam Client

According to the Valve Developer Wiki, steam is avalable for many different Linux distributions, including Fedora, via the RPMfusion repository.

RPM packages are available from RPMFusion for all supported Fedora releases (currently 18, 19 and 20). The package works fine on both i686 and x86_64 systems and already contains support for the S3 Texture compression library for open source drivers (radeon, intel and nouveau). Note: the package is in the process of being pushed to the stable repository, so at the moment you have to install it from the testing repository.

You perform the install by issuing yum -y --enablerepo=rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing install steam.

Fedora being RedHat-based, it is quite possible that it is compatible. In fact, on the very resource linked on the Valve site, the author states in a comment:

Unfortunately it works only in Fedora, RHEL 6 glibc libraries are too ancient, even when using the Ubuntu Steam Runtime. I will eventually add it to the RHEL 7 RPMFusion repository.

Wine / PlayOnLinux

The same Valve page suggests another option, running Steam for Windows under PlayOnLinux. There is a .tar.gz download that runs on all Linux versions, it just needs Python installed.

A note states Steam needs the Tahome truetype font, and to install it it suggests either

copying it from your windows pc to a flash drive and then putting it in a hidden folder (on your linux pc) named .fonts (you may have to make the folder0 in your root directory

or

installed using winetricks with the command winetricks tahoma

Disclaimer

1. The Valve page is apparently from 2009
2. I have not tested these procedures on RHEL as I have only Ubuntu and Fedora

Solution 2

You can run Steam client on EL6 using Ubuntu's eglibc 2.15 (hint: LD_LIBRARY_PATH). It is similar solution to that used in Google Chrome installer for EL6 (install_chrome.sh). Check this out: http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=2287&st=0&#entry17620

Comments

[alexus]

I know Google said similar thing about Chrome browser, yet there are ways to install latest Chrome browser on RHEL6. Is there some sort of hack/workarounds to get Steam on *EL6?

[That Brazilian Guy]

@alexus I have expanded my answer