Solution for when Steam shows no text on Wine

Noticing the advancements in emulation of Windows applications and games on Linux I decided to test out Wine, an open source implementation of the windows application layer using Linux and X.

However there seemed to be no text being displayed which I infered was a result of it not find the much needed Microsoft fonts.

A quick check using “emerge -s corefonts” revelead that the fonts were installed. However upon performing “slocate -u” and “slocate tahoma.ttf” I found that the Tahoma font for some reason was not installed.

Now I had two options,

1. Install the damn Tahoma font somehow
2. Emulate the font and let another font replace it

Now when you are as lazy as me you resort to step 2. The wine registry for your user is usually located in your home folder. It can be confirmed by doing “slocate system.reg | grep wine“.

Open this file (make sure it belongs to your user id) and locate the registry key

[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\FontSubstitutes]

If you are using nano you can do it by (replace USERID with your user id),

nano /home/USERID/.wine/system.reg

Pressing the key combination control+w (activates search mode) and using FontSubstitutes as a search parameter.

Now add the sub key below the registry key,

“Tahoma”=”Times New Roman”

This will use Times New Roman for whenever the Tahoma font is required.

Thats all that is required and now you should be able to see all the text and play Counter Strike and all the other games under Linux !