Fixing a Crash in Team Fortress 2

My son wanted Team Fortress 2 for Christmas. So far we've been mostly blessed with not having to feed a relentless video game appetite (aside from Minecraft). But I looked into it, and the game was free, with a very recently released Linux version. So I thought, "what the heck. It would probably only take me a few hours of fooling around to make it work."

Well, it was more than a few hours, but mostly because of my insistence on doing things "right".

TF2 is an interesting game. It runs in an environment, or framework, or something, called Steam. Steam supports many other games. In fact, it appears to be a whole ecosystem of games and communities around the games. There's a .deb to install Steam on Debian-derived LInuxes, and that's the first thing I installed.

I followed the Ubuntu forum for the installation, specifically using the experimental nVidia driver. I have a 9300, which is less than the forum says I need (9600 and above). Using the experimental driver allowed me to get Steam to run.

You have to sign up to the Steam community to use it. You can do so in the game.
 
To install TF2, I started Steam and found it in the on-line store. It's a long download. I think it took five or six hours on my reasonably fast ADSL. (I usually get 250-300 KB/s).

Finally, I could run the game under my user.

Here's where my insistence on doing it "right" first caused issues. My son has his own Linux user on his computer, which is not the user that installed Linux. His user was created as an ordinary non-admin user. My son doesn't have any special privileges on his computer, which is fine for me at his age. I don't want him to be able to mess up the configuration of his computer.

TF2 gets installed under the user's home directory, so I had to download again for my son. (You could probably just copy the appropriate directory or directories from one user to the other, but that would make the problem of getting the game running even harder if it didn't work the first time, which it didn't.)

Trying to run the game from my son's user name caused some disk activity and a few progress dialogues to appear, but then I'd just end up staring at the Steam home page after a few minutes. Running Steam from the command line allowed me to see all sorts of output, including the report of a "Segmentation fault" at the time the disk activity stopped.

Many hours of thrashing about and googling followed. Finally, it dawned on me that the only real difference between the users (mine and my son's) had to be the groups that they were in. (The Linux security model allocates some privileges to "groups" rather than directly to users. You then assign the user to a group to allow them the privileges of the group.)

Some trial and error fairly quickly determined that the user running TF2 has to be in the "sambashare" group. I logged in as me, the user who installed Linux. Then, in a Terminal, I could have typed:

sudo adduser user sambashare

However, I got intrigued that I couldn't find the GUI do manage users and groups. I discovered that it doesn't come installed by default on Linux Mint 13. So I installed the Gnome system tools:

sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools

With the Gnome system tools installed, I:

1. Went to Menu-> Administration-> Users and Groups
2. Selected my son's user name
3. Clicked "Advanced Settings"
4. Entered my password
5. Clicked the "User Privileges" tab
6. Checked the box beside "Share files with the local network"
7. Clicked OK all the way out again.

Note that I did all the above as myself, the user who installed Linux, not as my son.

Now I logged out of my session and logged in as my son and TF2 ran. Woo hoo!

Note that the LInux version of Steam and/or TF2 is very new right now (end of December, 2012). I found a lot of info on the net was no longer applicable, because of the evolution of the game and the platform. Even the contents of the Ubuntu forum for Steam changed drastically in the few days that I was working off and on to get the game running.

Off topic, but of interest to my geek friends: Here's a blog post about how the Steam effort is contributing to better graphics support in the Linux world.