These are further instructions to the Ubuntu Community documentation on Doom 3 (and Resurrection of Evil). Where those instructions deal with installing from the retail CDs which you’d be hard-pressed to find any more, my instructions are how to install from an existing Steam installation.

The Steam version of Doom 3 most likely exists within a Windows partition on your computer, but I don’t see why you couldn’t install Steam/Doom3 via Wine and copy the files over from that.

First, download the Doom 3 Linux installer from id software (~20MB). As of the time of this writing, the file name is doom3-linux-1.3.1.1304.x86.run.

Next, run the installer.

sudo sh doom3-linux-1.3.1.1304.x86.run

I left all options default, installing to /usr/local/games/doom3, which is why you need to run as sudo.

The game won’t run yet. We still have to copy the retail files over to the installation directory. So mount the Windows partition so we have access to those files.

The files we’re interested in are located in

Steam/steamapps/common/doom\ 3/base

and if you have the expansion

Steam/steamapps/common/doom\ 3/d3xp

and the CD-Keys (doomkey and xpkey) found in

Steam/steamapps/common/doom 3/base

To install Doom 3, navigate to the doom\ 3/base directory and copy each of

pak000.pk4
pak001.pk4
pak002.pk4
pak003.pk4
pak004.pk4

into

/usr/local/games/doom3/base

and if you are also installing Resurrection of Evil you’ll want to navigate to doom\ 3/d3xp and copy

pak000.pk4

into

/usr/local/games/doom3/d3xp

That’s it. To launch the game you can type

doom3

from the command line, and to launch Resurrection of Evil you type

doom3 +set fs_game d3xp

But wait! There’s more! A common complaint at this point is that the Steam CD-Key does not work. Doom 3 expects 18 characters, but the Steam provided CD Key contains only 16 characters.

Easy solution.

Copy doomkey, and xpkey if you have it, from the Doom 3 Steam directory into your local doom3 home directory

~/.doom3/base

Done!