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[Kocolino67]

Almost 3 months ago I had the idea to build my own (very weak) 'SteamMachine' around Steam for Linux to see what is possible with my hardware and to see how good or bad gaming on Linux is. I made a fairly long post by my standards, which I will copy & paste down here.

Hence, the news is out that a very early version of the SteamOS will be available this friday (13th of December) I think it's maybe the time to start a real SteamOS/SteamMachine open beta thread where we can discuss our experiences, frustration, and workarounds with the SteamOS beta on non-SteamMachines (i.e. your own PC). I could collect links to news, guides, tutorials, and videos in this OP.

14.12.2013



Build your own Steam Machine

SteamOS Beta is the first public release of our Linux-based operating system. The base system draws from Debian 7, code named Debian Wheezy. Our work builds on top of the solid Debian core and optimizes it for a living room experience. Most of all, it is an open Linux platform that leaves you in full control. You can take charge of your system and install new software or content that you want.

Installing and Customizing SteamOS
What are the SteamOS Hardware Requirements?
Processor: Intel or AMD 64-bit capable processor
Memory: 4GB or more RAM
Hard Drive: 500GB or larger disk
Video Card: NVIDIA graphics card (AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon!)
Additional: UEFI boot support & USB port for installation

How do I install SteamOS?

There are two different installation methods for SteamOS. The recommended method is the Default Installation method, which is a pre-configured image-based install using CloneZilla. The other method uses Debian Installer, which allows for customization after an automated install step. Please choose one of those methods below.

WARNING: Both installation methods will erase all content on the target computer

Default Installation

You will need to create a SteamOS System Restore USB stick to perform this install. The image provided here requires at least a 1TB disk.

1. Download the default SteamOS beta installation
2. Format a 4GB or larger USB stick with the FAT32 filesystem. Use "SYSRESTORE" as the partition name.
3. Unzip the contents of SYSRESTORE.zip to this USB stick to create the System Restore USB stick.
4. Put the System Restore USB stick in your target machine. Boot your machine and tell the BIOS to boot off the stick. (usually something like F8, F11 or F12 will bring up the BIOS boot menu).
5. Make sure you select the UEFI entry, it may look something like "UEFI: Patriot Memory PMAP". If there is no UEFI entry, you may need to enable UEFI support in your BIOS setup.
6. Select "Restore Entire Disk" from the GRUB menu.
7. When it is complete it will shutdown. Power on the machine to boot into your freshly re-imaged SteamOS.

Custom Installation

The second method is based on the Debian Installer. It requires multiple configuration steps:

1. Download the custom SteamOS beta installation
2. Unzip the SteamOS.zip file to a blank, FAT32-formatted USB stick.
3. Put the USB stick in your target machine. Boot your machine and tell the BIOS to boot off the stick. (usually something like F8, F11, or F12 will bring up the BIOS boot menu).
4. Make sure you select the UEFI entry, it may look something like "UEFI: Patriot Memory PMAP". If there is no UEFI entry, you may need to enable UEFI support in your BIOS setup.
5. Selected "Automated install" from the menu.
6. The rest of the installation is unattended and will repartition the drive and install SteamOS.
7. After installation is complete, log onto the resulting system (using the Gnome session) with the predefined "steam" account. The password is "steam". Run steam, accept the EULA, and let it bootstrap. Logoff the steam account.
8. Log on with the "desktop" account. The password is "desktop".
9. From a terminal window, run ~/post_logon.sh. This will prompt for a password - enter "desktop". This script will perform the post-install customizations, delete itself, then reboot into the recovery partition capture utility.
10. Confirm "y" to continue and the recovery partition will be created. When it is finished, reboot into your freshly installed SteamOS.

13./14.12.2013

GAF thread SteamOS out now (beta)

Remember this is a beta release and not the final product.

http://steamdb.info/blog/35/ 960MB

SteamOS is based on Debian 7.1 Wheezy

github: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS

Use a VM Application if you're unsure on how to to install it on a PC first.

FAQ: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395741989999/

REMINDER

• SteamOS is available for intrepid Linux hackers to try out
• NVIDIA graphics card support ONLY
• UEFI boot support ONLY
• Both Default and Custom installation methods WILL ERASE ALL CONTENT ON YOUR TARGET COMPUTER
• NO DUAL BOOT SUPPORT

This is a beta, you have been warned!

Some smart cookie figured out a BIOS boot method.

My roommate did a quick overview if anyone wants to see if it's worth installing. It's just extremely barebones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS4sTG_Fueg

13.12.2013


comprehensive overview - 'SteamOS: What we know so far and what to expect' by Marlamin

And here is my (now updated) original post:

I took around 12 hours to reach >100.000 possible beta candidates after Valve's second announcement. Since Valve decided to ship 300 Steam Machine prototypes the chances are pretty low that any of us will receive one of these mind-boggling Gabe Cubes.

But hey:

Soon, we’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.

Will I be able to build my own box to run SteamOS?
Yes.

Nah, I can't wait. Hence, I decided to add myself. Not only that I'm impatient, I also belong to the potential target audience anyway. I have an old Zephyr XBox360, my dusty old desktop hardware is listed below & I have to use my Macbook Pro 2010 for some PC related gaming (OSX or WinXP). You can see, this setup is not very future-proof and for most of the NeoGAF members presumably a nightmare.
I also collected a huge bunch of Indie-Bundles, which are mostly also playable in Linux - my Steam library would make a great launch title collection. Furthermore, I have no screen right now, only a LCD tv in my livingroom. I like to play with the terminal, but I consider myself as a pure Linux beginner with some google skills. And last but not least - I save all my dimes and hopes for the official Oculus Rift.

But first, the prototype(s)

While these official Steam Machines are still in development, I help myself. As always, I believe the best way to ensure that the right products are getting made is to do it yourself. Therefore, I have designed an old & low-performance prototype that’s far away from being optimized for gaming, for the living room, and for Steam. Of course, it’s also completely upgradable and open.

Here’s how to participate

Want to make yourself eligible to participate in the beta? Get some hardware, install a Linux distro and Steam & share your experiences in the future OT which does not exist ATM.

My hardware:

• MSI K8N Neo-4F motherboard
• AMD Athlon X2 64 4200+ Sockel 939
• 4x1Gig PC400 memory
• XpertVision Radeon X1950GT 512MB AGP 8x
• Samsung 4000Gig 720rpm SATA I
• 420W PSU

The X2 64 is one of the first dual core amd64 CPUs. My approach will be to build a Linux based custom Steam Machine. To everyone's surprise Valve decided to play it slow, hence SteamOS is not available right now. Therefore, my first step will be to install Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 and Steam for Linux. In the future SteamOS is very welcome to join this beta as well. After reading a lot about Steam & Nvidia it's interesting to see how my Radeon will perform under Ubuntu and also SteamOS.

To further complicate my approach I will use non-standardized and extremely inappropriate peripherals:

• Original XBox360 controller via Microsoft USB thingy - which is already a pain in OSX with wide ranges from bad to not functioning in Super Meat Boy, Pid & Limbo
• Apple Magic Mouse - a technical disasterpiece for any FPS
• Apple Wireless Keyboard

I'm looking forward to connected the dots, get angry, try to make the balance and finally deliver more than the sum of it's parts. This post will be updated regularly. Here is my Steam profile and feel free to add me: http://steamcommunity.com/id/rockpaperbird

//silent edit, because I'm sure that nobody will read this anyway

Wow, I'm surprised, everything was easy and smooth. After installing Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 via the USB installer, I installed Steam for Linux. No problems so far.
I learned, that I don't need the official Catalyst driver for my X1950. The GPU is to old and not supported. But it's alright, the open radeon driver fully supports my chipset.
Steam was already running and I plugged Microsoft's wireless controller adapter into the USB port. This installation works well for Windows and most of the Steam games with controller support are good to play. But for OSX you need an unofficial driver and half of the OSX steam games with full controller support are still not playable. Hence, I expected some troubles. To my surprise after synchronizing the controller with the adapter Steam started the Big Window mode automatically and I was instantly able scroll through the menu with the controller.

The games so far
I downloaded Waking Mars and FEZ. Waking Mars was just a short test if the framerate is alright if the game is not so demanding. I have no idea how many frames, but it was smooth. Happy and reassured I turned to FEZ - which is running good on my MB pro 2010, but you can also see some slow downs here and there (this is not the case when I boot into Win XP via bootcamp and play this installation). However, FEZ on Linux runs great. No problems and full controller support.

Now, I started downloading TF2 because I don't think that this will work well. Even my office computer (Dell workstation from 2012 with Nivdia Quadro GPU, Xeon CPU, and heaps of memory) has trouble to run TF2 in Ubuntu (around 8 to 10 frames), while the Win7 partition installation achieves with all settings at high around 80 fps.

That's it for now - I think I will test some more games for controller support during the next days & I'm looking forward to see Half Life 2 and Portal 1 & 2 in action.

//silent edit #2, because I'm sure that nobody will read this anyway

• Team Fortress 2 - at first I got this error message: "Could not find required OpenGL entry point 'glColorMaskIndexedEXT'! Either your video card is unsupported, or your OpenGL driver needs to be updated." - I found this discussion and one work-around. This helped, but TF2 is unplayable at 1 to 3 fps with lowest settings. Would be nice to know if the Source 2 engine supports older GPUs in SOS by default via new drivers.
• Half Life - no frame rate problems. The controller is not very usefull, but I can play with wireless mouse and keyboard.
• Amnesia - Playable with mouse & keyboard. I would expect more frames under higher settings, but my hardware is very old anyway.
• Proteus - the controller handling is great, also no problems
• Electronic Super Joy - pixel indie jump'n'run, controller works well

So far switching from Windows or OSX to Linux, installing Steam and play some games can be done within in one day. Usually, I could solve the minor problems by some google research. Connecting peripherals from Microsoft, Apple, cheap Chinese distributors was no problem at all - mostly plug & play. Older hardware works also, but the driver support for the GPU seems to be a bottleneck for playing source engine games (i.e. TF2, HL2). I wonder how GPUs with newer chipsets perfom.

I also tested to play with an old PS1 controller. I used a PSX/N64 USB converter for this. Sadly, the controller wasn't working out of the box via simple plug'n'play.

I also bought a new GPU one month ago and now my CPU is the bottleneck of my inferior system. But I'm still on holidays and I won't arrive back home until sunday night. So, I'm not sure which new GPU I own and how this changes the described games above.

&

Let's keep this one focused to the technical aspects of Steamboxes/SteamOS please.

 

[Serrenn]

-snip-

 

[Night_Trekker]

Ok, anyone can explain me why people are excited to try Steamboxes? I can understand the controller thing, but why this?

People don't want to buy nextgen because there are not enough new games, but there will be zero new games on Steambox which you can't play on your PC already. Also I doubt there will be any 3rd party support any time soon.

This reminds me of yet another cycle of "<Insert Year> will be the year of Linux gaming!"

How different(Other than less games) this box will be right now compared to usual PC with Steam set to start in Big Picture mode?

...because people like to play games that aren't new too? PC exclusives? Free online play?

What are you talking about with "third-party support"? It will be a PC. It will play PC games. Who needs to "support" it? They just need to release PC games.

 

[SparkTR]

Ok, anyone can explain me why people are excited to try Steamboxes? I can understand the controller thing, but why this?

People don't want to buy nextgen because there are not enough new games, but there will be zero new games on Steambox which you can't play on your PC already. Also I doubt there will be any 3rd party support any time soon.

This reminds me of yet another cycle of "<Insert Year> will be the year of Linux gaming!"

How different(Other than less games) this box will be right now compared to usual PC with Steam set to start in Big Picture mode?

It's a cost effective box that's out of the gate optimized for living room play. You don't have to look at individual parts (which is apparently too hard for many people), priced competitively with the consoles (which has never happened before this early in the gen in regards to PC hardware), it interfaces with your desktop PC Steam set-up, and you gain access to all of Steams benefits (like sales and current library).

Also it's an open box. You can build an emu machine that can play nearly every console from the SNES to the Wii.

 

[Serrenn]

...because people like to play games that aren't new too? PC exclusives? Free online play?

What are you talking about with "third-party support"? It will be a PC. It will play PC games. Who needs to "support" it? They just need to release PC games.

I think you are missing the point here.

I was talking about SteamOS. Its not a Windows PC if its using SteamOS. I don't think we will get Watchdogs, Titanfall, or whatever people want on SteamOS. And no one is going to port old titles to Linux now.

What we will get is some indie games(Not all, but some) and maybe some big name devs who can afford to experiment with this.

It's a cost effective box that's out of the gate optimized for living room play. You don't have to look at individual parts (which is apparently too hard for many people), priced competitively with the consoles (which has never happened before this early in the gen in regards to PC hardware), it interfaces with your desktop PC Steam set-up, and you gain access to all of Steams benefits (like sales and current library).

Also it's an open box. You can build an emu machine that can play nearly every console from the SNES to the Wii.

I get this, but this is basically every HTPC description. People weren't too interested in those, I think. I was thinking about Steamboxes with SteamOS and the desire to install SteamOS on home PCs.

 

[Mobius and pet octopus]

Oh nice, I wasn't aware the steamos comes friday... open beta too? sweet... my body is ready.

 

[denx]

Geez, first reply and thread is already getting derailed. We don't need yet another "I don't see the point of Steamboxes" discussion people. Let's keep this one focused to the technical aspects of Steamboxes/SteamOS please.

 

[Serrenn]

Geez, first reply and thread is already getting derailed. We don't need yet another "I don't see the point of Steamboxes" discussion people. Let's keep this one focused to the technical aspects of Steamboxes/SteamOS please.

You are right, sorry. Perhaps my post was a bit inflammatory. Edited it.

 

[Ysiadmihi]

Has Valve said much about how the streaming will work with SteamOS? I'm wondering if I should slap together a box using some of my older parts or if a laptop wtih HDMI would be sufficient enough.

 

[Kocolino67]

Ok, anyone can explain me why people are excited to try Steamboxes?

Imo a Steambox or a Steammachine can be a regular PC but with the SteamOS instead of any other OS, or one of the out-of-the-box Steamboxes/machines - the definition regarding the Steambox is still fuzzy and will be in the future, because any hardware developer can come up with it's own design. So, there is no big difference to a Win OS PC or a Alienware gaming desktop with Windows.

Personally, I'm excited because if the SteamOS progress over time (Steam took years to reach its present impact) there will be no need to have a Windows partition anymore. This together with the native GabePad support, the streaming abilities, the open approach (hack it if you want/like/can), my huge Steam library, and future OculusVR gaming...the Steambox/machine future could be great. So, call me excited.

People don't want to buy nextgen because there are not enough new games, but there will be zero new games on Steambox which you can't play on your PC already. Also I doubt there will be any 3rd party support any time soon.

We will see. Valve isn't the company which rushes with new software, ideas, and games

Spoiler

Episode 3 harhar

. Usually, they play it slow. And so far they had success with it. 3rd party will come. Believe.

//edit...

Let's keep this one focused to the technical aspects of Steamboxes/SteamOS please.

Has Valve said much about how the streaming will work with SteamOS? I'm wondering if I should slap together a box using some of my older parts or if a laptop wtih HDMI would be sufficient enough.

There was a thread with some new details regarding the streaming -> Valve going into detail about In-Home Streaming

 

[Iseeyou]

So uh besides indie games what else does SteamOS support?

 

[Mobius and pet octopus]

Someone with some linux knowledge should step up and make some vids or do a stream or something to educate the linuxoobs of the world, on the new OS of course.

 

[cyberheater]

Looking forward to trying this.

I'm going to see if I can dual boot this on my Win8 gaming PC.

 

[Ysiadmihi]

There was a thread with some new details regarding the streaming -> Valve going into detail about In-Home Streaming

Oh excellent, thank you. I look forward to trying this with my laptop. I already have my PC connected to my TV through HDMI but it will be fun to dick around with at least.

 

[drgambit]

I am curious to see how this is going to fan out. Especially when there are no easy ways around installing anything in Linux.

I remember trying to install something as simple as minecraft in ubuntu and almost threw my computer out the window. Of course if I had an extra copy of windows this wouldn't be an issue.

 

[mrklaw]

Would you get a little more performance out of Linux, or doesn't it make much difference? I have an old laptop that barely runs anything, but maybe I could rework it into running a few basic games and media?

 

[Kocolino67]

I am curious to see how this is going to fan out. Especially when there are no easy ways around installing anything in Linux.

I remember trying to install something as simple as minecraft in ubuntu and almost threw my computer out the window. Of course if I had an extra copy of windows this wouldn't be an issue.

I started to play around with Ubuntu early this year, so I'm not very experienced. And it depends from case to case. Installing Ubuntu is very easy, now. Just prepare a bootstick with very few simply steps.
In Ubuntu you have the software centre and there you can search for software and download and install it with one click.
Moreover, I very like the ability to type the name of any software (not games) in the terminal window. Then it either starts or it tells you how to download and install it with one simple command.

On the other hand - google for troubleshooting is your best friend.