I'm trying to run Steam through Wine. When it starts to load, I get the main Steam page and the Steam news page. In the lower right hand corner my in-game friends start to pop up. Then Steam crashes. I have followed everything I can find on properly running Steam through Wine and just can't get it.
Are you 64 bit? If so don't use the 64 bit wine, it is still experimental and unreliable. I understand it only works with 64 bit Windows apps. Use wine.i686