steam fails in offline mode

[nerdman978]

I recently downloaded and installed steam under WINE and it worked brilliantly. Also, I downloaded (from steam) Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source under my steam account. Then, after much prodding from my mom had to move my computer back upstairs to my room to suffer without internet. I was fine with this, as I had games to keep me occupied. I moved the computer back to my room, booted it up and launched Half-Life 2, only to be greeted with an error message saying that the application could not be run in offline mode. Then I tried just launching steam, and that also failed. Why does a great idea like Steam have to suck so much? All I want is to play Half-Life 2 but Steam won't run, and I have already saved my account info on my computer, but no success. Any suggestions?

[dudeofthedead]

See, that's the biggest problem with Steam: you can't run it in offline mode. Sucks even more when all you want to do is play through a solo campaign.

EDIT: well, my bad, apparently it now works offline as well. See here (http://support.steampowered.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=213)

[cogadh]

Um, Steam can run in offline mode, but it needs to be started with an internet connection enabled, then set for offline mode. Once offline mode is set, you can then launch it without an internet connection.

[dudeofthedead]

Yes, that can be useful if you don't want to go through painful updates every time you launch Steam, although that can be disabled too.

[nerdman978]

thanks for the help and quick response all. If I have time I'll reconnect to the internet and follow the how to on the steam page.

[nerdman978]

ok, now STEAM refuses to connect even when I am actually connected to the internet, what now?

[edit] Sorry I found the problem, I had configured it to always start in offline mode with a steam.cfg file that told steam to do the former. solved!