Recently, someone emailed me to see how you could get Steam going in Linux and I replied with using Wine and PlayOnLinux, which managed to get their copy of Half Life 2 and Left for Dead 2 working, however, with glitches. When he further pressed me for more information on how to get it working without glitches, I told him what I hate saying myself: seeing as there is no official Steam client for Linux (yet?), there was no way to provide him with a solid solution. To sum up the rest of the emails, he turned extremely nasty, calling me a liar for calling Linux a good alternative to Windows and that it is a load of garbage and should never be released until it was on par with Windows.

Now, as nasty as that sounds, it didn’t tick me off, nor did I try to talk him into some of the advantages that Linux has over Windows. While Linux is not as experienced in driver compatibilities and in game selections, this is a common problem. As as you can see by my weekend gaming posts, it is hard to dig up decent games that are at a level of completeness that can compete with Windows games.

DJL aims to change all this, as well as making life extremely simple for those that use Linux. DJL, as the title suggests, is an extremely proficient clone of Steam, allowing for Linux users to download and install Linux games no matter which OS they’re using. I used this program on Salix Linux and despite a hiccup on downloading, I had no problem whatsoever. Some screenshots below depict how it looks and acts like.

Installer for installing games

Game Launching screen

While the project itself has not been updated since 2009, it still works fine and leads me to believe that it is still possible to use this for a while longer as the servers are still up. At times it does suffer from some downtime but it is nothing if not incredibly useful to Linux users. Like Steam, you can also make desktop shortcuts so you can play your games without problems… but unlike Steam, once the games are downloaded and installed, they are stored on your local hard drive, rather then letting you stream and play online. I found it to be an interesting take in terms of installing, because this eliminates the need to compile games from source and allow you to instantly play the games you want when you want.

I will be honest and admit I did face a hiccup in playing the games, after one reboot, I had no games I could install or play that were installed, but deleting some hidden files (.djl folder inside your home folder, hit Control+H to show hidden files) made it work again. I also had a problem in connecting but that was because I had a poor connection that night. All in all, DJL is an interesting way of keeping Linux users entertained, that’s for sure! To run it, all you have to do is right click on the ‘sh’ script you download, edit it’s associations under properties, and let sh be what runs it, then double click on it. The rest couldn’t be easier.

– DJL’s homepage –
– Download DJL –