[Wine] Newb here.Ubuntu 9.10, ATI Adeon x1270, trying to run Steam.

[waynefoutz]

Sick of Vista, don't want to give MS another $200 for another bloated crappy OS. My old laptop had Ubuntu 8.04, but it was incapable of running Steam games, so I'm new to this Wine stuff. So here it goes, I've been away from linux for the last 2 years, but when 9.10 came out, I decided it was time to come back and give it another look. I have everything up and running, with the drivers that come out of the box with 9.10.  Wine is installed, I have a bunch of older games, Quake 2 for example, and they run great. OpenGL seems to be working fine, and linux native openGL games run great. I can turn on and use all the desktop effects, but I have to turn them off to get Quake2 to run in WINE. When I do...NICE! But I install Steam, load up Half Life 2, it looks good through the splash screens and logos, but when the game loads, I can't read the menus, and there is a noticeable diagonal line through the middle of the screen, from top right to bottom left. The only difference I can think of is Half Life 2 is a directx game, not opengl. Anyhow, I can't get this stupid game to run. 

I've tried installing ATI drivers, but it breaks my install...by the way, where in the hell did xorg.conf go??? WTF? According to ATI, the last version of of Catalyst that supports my card is 9.2, which is incompatable with Ubuntu's new Xserver version. Tried downgrading that, then installing the 9.2 ATI, everything got hosed. Tried the older open source drivers, no 3d at all.  I'm kind of at a loss here, not sure where the xorg.conf went. 

My level of expertise with linux is pretty much copying and pasting lines into the terminal, that was enough a couple years ago, when I was running 8.04, everything worked....

Anyone have any suggestions? I just want to play Team fortress without having this 25 gigabyte monster called Vista on my system!