CrewChief on Linux

#Tutorial Date: 21/05/2025

Follow everything stricly, otherwise wont work. Read every line of this guide.
Nothing needs to be run as root, never.
Best way ATM seems to be install per game.

Preparation:
Download Crewchief.msi
Install wine, winetricks and protontricks on your distro!

Info:
It's always better to isolate the installations, beeter for housekeping, so we will place Crewchied in ~/crewchief_wine_prefix,
this will be reused by all games. Personalizations are done per game, on the game vessel that steam alocates.
To have a full restart you can always fully remove ~/crewchief_wine_prefix and retry.

1. Installig CrewChief dependencies, ignore mono related popups if they appear, first dotnet48:
WINEPREFIX=~/crewchief_wine_prefix winetricks -q dotnet48

2. Second Crewchief, launch Crewchief installer and install it normally, in the end Mark the option to "Launch Crewchief" after install.
WINEPREFIX=~/crewchief_wine_prefix wine Downloads/CrewChiefV4.msi

4. With Crewchief open, do nothing, do not press "Start Crew Chief", just click on the 3 "Sound Pack Status" so the all the
updated soudpacks are installed. Crewchief will ask to restart a few times which you can do untill all sound packs
are up to date. Its a lot of restarts, like more than 20.

3. Launching into game vessel:
protontricks-launch ~/crewchief_wine_prefix/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Britton\ IT\ Ltd/CrewChiefV4/CrewChiefV4.exe
In the window that opens, select your game.

Click "Start Crew Chief", if a popup appears saying the game needs a plugin press ok, so it gets installed.
If the popup does not appear, maybe its a good idea to clean the plugin directory of your game, so CrewChief can install
the version it provides. On this vessel the audio pack is outdated again and it wont let update, quite annoying. 

A workaroud is to copy the ones we updated above. todo so, get your game ID with the command: 
grep name ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/appmanifest_*

So in my case the gameid is: 2399420
So I will copy the audio downloaded on the PREFIX where it worked to the proton vessel, with:
cp -r ~/crewchief_wine_prefix/drive_c/users/slemke/AppData/Local/CrewChiefV4/ ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2399420/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local>
and
cp -r ~/crewchief_wine_prefix/drive_c/users/slemke/AppData/Local/Britton_IT_Ltd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2399420/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local>

Crew chief options needd, otherwise only works the first time:
-> Uncheck: "Use nAudio for playback"

Start over:
You can always delete the WINEPREFIX that the game runs in.

If you want to "clear/uninstall" a game, run the installer with protontricks-launch, select the game on the popup 
and then later select uninstall on the crewchief installed: 
Z:\home\slemke\.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Le Mans Ultimate

There is space for improvement, this guide shouls also serve to give you ideas.

Hello,
unfortunately it did not work for me with your instructions, can you help me?

Since I see that you are from Germany I thought maybe you could have a look at the following link

https://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/raceroom-r3r-und-crewchiefv4-wollen-nicht-komu/

I would be very happy if you can help me

Greetings Red

I probably need to do the whole think to remember, and possible find shortcomings.

Thanks! this works fine, although the crewchief window freezes a lot. It still works with the window frozen but you can't change any setting. I've disabled naudio as suggested but that didn't help. The weird thing is, when I close my game (rF2) the window goes back to life

The wine one shares the sharedmemory data to Linux, this is needed for at least TinyPedal, dunno if Rfactor works with it for CrewChief.
I stopped using a spotter at all, it becomes repetitive at some point.

Thank you very much, that would help me a lot and I think also other Raceroom players. I am also very open to suggestions and other possibilities that lead to the same result. Greetings Red

Aside from disabling naudio, did you change anything in the crewchief settings or did you leave everything the same?
Thanks.

At some point I had this 2 items in the guide, dunno if still relevant:

-> Disable naudio.
-> Also make sure in the CrewChief prefs you are using nAudio for playback with “WASAPI”
interface type. Otherwise CrewChief works for a few minutes and then hangs.

Followed your guide and got Crew Chief installed but it doesn't seem to see the game (Automobilista 2 in this case). I've turned on shared memory, Crew Chief launches correctly if I launch it directly, but when I try to launch it from protontricks I get the following error and nothing happens. I can't seem to get Crew Chief to run in the Automobilista prefix.

flatpak run com.github.Matoking.protontricks

/app/lib/python3.12/site-packages/protontricks/util.py:11: UserWarning: pkg_resources is deprecated as an API. See https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html. The pkg_resources package is slated for removal as early as 2025-11-30. Refrain from using this package or pin to Setuptools<81.
  import pkg_resources

protontricks (WARNING): Unknown Flatpak file system permission 'xdg-config/gtk-3.0:ro', ignoring.

protontricks (WARNING): Unknown Flatpak file system permission 'xdg-config/gtk-4.0:ro', ignoring.

protontricks (WARNING): Unknown Flatpak file system permission 'xdg-config/vkBasalt:create', ignoring.

protontricks (WARNING): Unknown Flatpak file system permission 'xdg-config/MangoHud:create', ignoring.

steam-runtime-launcher-service[88]: W: The --socket option is deprecated. Prefer to use --session or --bus-name.
Executing cd /app/bin
                     winetricks GUI enabled, using zenity 3.44.5
                                                                Using winetricks 20250102 (protontricks) - sha256sum: 7b77e5a560c886f9945dc4206f0ea98d099c0fd902ae05681fe988e45f456e3b with wine-10.0 and WINEARCH=win64
                                                                                                         steam-runtime-launch-client[1566]: W: The --socket option is deprecated. 
Prefer to use the session bus.

fsync: up and running.

00cc:fixme:wineusb:query_id Unhandled ID query type 0x5.

00c0:err:hid:stop_polling_device could not find poll entry matching device 0x7fc5f4015830 fd

00c0:err:hid:stop_polling_device could not find poll entry matching device 0x7fc5f401d870 fd