Broken Steam Under Wine

[thr]

When running steam under Wine there is no text, rendering it nearly completely unusable. I've found the solution to this before, disabling dwrite. I tried tacking a -no-dwrite onto my command to run steam, and editing it in regedit, but this didn't solve my problem. Neither did using winecfg to edit the registry. Through extensive googling, I couldn't find another solution, so I submitted a bug report. So now I'm here, and I need much help, as from what I can tell my problem is unique, and it is ruining my wine experience.

I'm using Wine 1.6.2 in Debian Jessie. Perhaps I need to force a more current version of Wine?

[dimesio]

It can't hurt to upgrade, but disabling dwrite should work on 1.6.2. When you disabled it in winecfg, did you select it from the dropdown list, or did you type it in? (The reason I ask is because I have seen a case where disabling it didn't work because of a typo.)

Do you have 32 bit libfreetype installed, and was your Wine compiled with freetype support? IIRC, missing 32 bit freetype was a problem in the past with Debian (though I thought it had been solved).

If you don't have corefonts installed (either systemwide or in the winefprefix), install them.

If it's not one of those things, post terminal output.

[thr]

I installed libfreetype6-dev:i386 with aptitude, I'm not sure how to tell whether it was compiled with freetype support. I selected dwrite from a drop down menu when I disabled it with winecfg. I also got the corefonts installer but I'm not sure whether that's something I have to run, it seemed as if fonts were installed when I downloaded that. How do I use code tags on this forum? My installation of steam still shows no text.

[Bob Wya]

When running steam under Wine there is no text, rendering it nearly completely unusable. I've found the solution to this before, disabling dwrite. I tried tacking a -no-dwrite onto my command to run steam, and editing it in regedit, but this didn't solve my problem. Neither did using winecfg to edit the registry. Through extensive googling, I couldn't find another solution, so I submitted a bug report. So now I'm here, and I need much help, as from what I can tell my problem is unique, and it is ruining my wine experience.

I'm using Wine 1.6.2 in Debian Jessie. Perhaps I need to force a more current version of Wine?

@thr

Have you visited the AppDB page for the Steam Client?? Because your problems make we wonder why I bother maintaining it! There are multiple solutions documented there - to the particular Steam Client "issue" you face...

The suggested...

Code: Select all

env WINEPREFIX="(your-prefix)" winetricks --no-isolate steam

Will install the Steam automagically. Then it will disable the dwrite.dll & gameoverlayrenderer.dll (the latter library also continues to cause major issues with Steam). It will also pull in MS corefonts.

For the more adventurous you can also do...

Code: Select all

wine reg add 'HKCU\Software\Valve\Steam' /v DWriteEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000

When run (in your Wineprefix) this code will only disable dwrite.dll and just for the Steam Client.

Using a Valve command line switch to the disable dwrite.dll is listed last as a solution... This is intentional!! As this is far from a convenient solution... What if a Steam Client update silently removes the command line switch option that you are using? Don't forget you are relying on Valve code being in place - not simply disabling the dwrite.dll stub using Wine builtin features and WineHQ (semi-)officially supported utilities.

Bob

[facoptere]

I don't know if this could be useful, but the following worked for me:
winetricks --no-isolate corefonts sound=disabled tahoma gecko vcrun2010 steam
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/Steam.exe

"sound=disabled" was needed so that steam login could proceed. I use steam only for downloads.