The problem might be, that steam has done a self-update on Saturday to the current version, which is not compatible with older wine-versions. So when was the last time you used steam before Friday?
So for a wine-novice it might be the best to use the installer (see
download-page), because that gives you an .app which opens a completely prepared terminal window on startup. So you don't have to set the path to the binaries manually and you don't have to compile wine on your own.
I would also recommend to use a separate Wine-prefix for each program you want to run, because it prevent conflicts between programs (or components you may have installed to run a specific program.) and it makes it easier to remove prefixes that you no longer need or recreate a prefix if something is horribly broken (e.g while you are testing things). And if you need the exact same prefix you can just copy it.
To create a prefix simply start the Wine.app and paste the following code into the window (for the path simply drag the folder where you want your wineprefix-folder to be created into the terminal and add "/" followed by the name for the prefix)
Code:
WINEPREFIX=<path to your prefix> WINEARCH=<win32 or win64> winecfg
Now you have a new prefix which you can configure however you want. If you want to install steam you can download the official installer and use the following code to execute it:
Code:
WINEPREFIX=<path to your prefix> wine <path to SteamSetup.exe>
And again, the easiest way to get the correct path is drag the folder/exe and drop it into the terminal-window.
Another way would be installing via winetricks, which can be very helpful to install programs (like steam and also some games) and additional components (like dlls), because you only have to say, what you want to install, and winetricks will do the rest.
Getting winetricks is quite easy. Just download it from github, use "chmod +x winetricks" to make is executable. But this way can lead into problems, because you sometimes need additional libraries to run winetricks.
So it might be easier to install winetricks by using a package manager like homebrew, macports or fink (I would suggest homebrew because you only need the "Command line tools" and not the full Xcode installation, and it's quite easy to install) After installing the package manager you can install wine tricks (in case of homebrew the command is "brew install winetricks"), which will also install all necessary dependencies.
One important note: the winetricks installation and all other things you do by using winetricks should happen in the terminal window that opens up, when you start the wine.app. If not, winetricks will complain that wine is not installed or maybe install an additional wine-version inside "/usr/bin" or "/usr/local".
Now you can use winetricks. If you want to install steam just type the following:
Code:
WINEPREFIX=<path to your prefix> winetricks steam
In this state, steam may not work completely (at least for me it has some problems even when i use -no-cef-sandbox), so I installed d3dx9_42, vcrun2008 and xact (one after another) by using winetricks.
Oh, that post is a little bit long, but I hope it helps. If you have any questions, just ask. I'll try to answer as fast as I can.