Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: steam (Page 2 of 4)

SteamOS is out – based on Debian, not Ubuntu

December 14, 2013 / / 7 Comments

steamos

The release of SteamOS was right on time, as promised by Valve. SteamOS is an Operating System designed to play your (Steam) games on a TV. The accompanying “Steam Box“, which will be running the SteamOS and which is supposed to be a hardware platform as open as the Operating System designed for it, is still in Beta but 300 prototype devices (running the SteamOS) have been sent to eager testers together with a purpose-built Steam Controller.

Apparently the Steam Box will also allow you to play your games on your regular (Windows?) computer and “stream” the game’s display to the TV connected to the Steam Box (or any homebrew computer running SteamOS). I don’t know if that will deliver a perfect gaming experience (PC and TV must be close to each other) but I guess that this is how Windows users can still profit from the Steam Box (since it runs a Linux OS, Windows games are out of the question).

You can already download the slightly less than one gigabyte large archive of the OS. It is still a beta release, so not advised for “inexperienced Linux users”. Well, we Slackers do not fall into that category.

From the SteamOS FAQ:

Q: What is SteamOS?
SteamOS is a fork (derivative) of Debian GNU/Linux. The first version (SteamOS 1.0) is called ‘alchemist’ and it is based on the Debian ‘wheezy’ (stable 7.1) distribution.

The major changes made in SteamOS are:

  • Backported eglibc 2.17 from Debian testing
  • Added various third-party drivers and updated graphics stack (Intel and AMD graphics support still being worked on)
  • Updated kernel tracking the 3.10 longterm branch (currently 3.10.11)
  • Custom graphics compositor designed to provide a seamless transition between Steam, its games and the SteamOS system overlay
  • Configured to auto-update from the Valve SteamOS repositories

I think it is a positive message to all Open Source fans that Debian has been chosen as the base for SteamOS and not Ubuntu, which was the initial target for the Linux Steam Client. I have been watching the threads discussing issues with Steam on Ubuntu and was always glad that running Steam on Slackware was so much easier 🙂

I downloaded the OS image and despite online warnings that the download server was overloaded, it arrived at  6.5 MB/sec which is the maximum bandwith of my own Internet link. I have not yet tried it, but somewhere this week I will certainly dress up a Virtual Machine to see what it looks like. I wonder what will happen, as SteamOS expects Nvidia graphics hardware to be present, although the FAQ mentions “(AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon)“.

Exciting times for Linux gamers.  Ever since Gabe Newell’s public statement at LinuxCon 2013 that the future of gaming was on Linux, not on Windows, his company has been porting Steam games to Linux at a frantic pace, with other Open Source software profiting from their efforts (LLVM, X.Org drivers are examples). A year before that speech, Gabe Newell already called Windows 8 “a catastrophe” at a videogame conference in Seattle. Valve, a big thumbs up!

Eric

SteamOS coming to your living room

September 23, 2013 / / 3 Comments

steamos

Today, Valve Software has announced their next move in bringing the Steam content delivery (read: gaming) platform to the masses. The developer is going to wrap Steam into its own in-house developed Linux Operating System!

The SteamOS is meant to be installed onto living room devices (your TV, multimedia streaming box, and probably onto a SteamBox eventually).

It was already clear that Valve was sort-of preparing for a customization layer on top of a Linux OS; the http://repo.steampowered.com/hometest/pool/steam/ directories show some interesting tidbits. But rather than building the Steam binaries with Ubuntu Linux as the OS target, like they have done until now, Valve have come up with a whole Operating System of their own.

The good news is that this will be a Linux OS and it will be free to use by gamers as well as manufacturers. It will probably not be based on Slackware – their loss… but hey, they can always hire me. Keeping Steam supported in Slackware will not be a daunting task, because I am willing to bet a few dimes that the SteamOS will be yet another Ubuntu derivative or at least a Debian derivative.

Let’s hope that there will be a real Steam Box in the end. Having a SteamOS firmware for multimedia devices and smart TV’s will at least keep some of you busy. Interesting enough, Valve released a couple of teasers in the past week, hinting for interesting announcements. Well, this was the first of three. The next one can be expected on Wednesday 25 september. To shorten the wait, you may want to check out a review of the keynote speech at LinuxCon 2013 by Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell. His thoughts shed more light on what we may expect from Valve in the near future.

steamos_back_buttonHave fun! Eric

Half-Life Dedicated Server

March 9, 2013 / / 14 Comments

half-life-logo I have written down how I configured my Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS) in a new Slackware Documentation article. You can find the article here: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:software:halflife_dedicated_server

The reason why I felt compelled to write this, was that the information you can find using Google, and the information on Valve’s own developer Wiki, is not 100% accurate or even outdated.

Writing an article also allowed me to add some tips, like starting the game server in “screen”, and explaining how you can auto-start the game server when your Slackware server boots, and keep the game files updated using a daily cron job.

I hope that the new SlackDocs article will trigger fellow Slackers to create their own HLDS server, and invite each other for some fragging. Hint: you can use the Slackware SteamCommunity group to schedule events like these.

Next on the TODO list is documenting how I created the “minimal Slackware” 32-bits virtual machine (less than 500 MB of Slackware installation footprint) which I use to run my own HLDS at home.

And after that, I still have to document how I setup a TeamSpeak server on the same virtual machine, which can be used for quality in-game voice chat. Lots left to do when I get bored again…

Cheers, Eric

Survey results for Linux gaming on Steam

March 2, 2013 / / 23 Comments

steamValve published their monthly statistics on the Steam gaming platform.The February 2013 Hardware & Software survey results show that the adoption of Linux has doubled in the past month (click on the “OS Version” stats to see all Operating Systems, not just Windows).

While Ubuntu is obviously taking the largest part of the Linux pie, the total percentage of Linux Steam gamers is now somewhere between 2 and 3 (Slackware being hidden in the “Other” platforms). This means Linux as a gaming platform is about to overtake Apple’s OS (at least, for Steam). Who said that Linux users are freeloaders, not interested in anything that is not open source and gratis?

How are we doing as Slackware community? If you look at the Slackware Group page on the SteamCommunity site, you will see that we are about to pass the 100 members mark. I think that one month ago, that number was 13. So, the group is expanding fast, and it is good to see that Slackers are die-hard gamers too 🙂

I updated my steamclient package to the latest officially released version 1.0.0.35 yesterday.

It’s still a 32-bit Steam client of course, and all Steam games are 32-bit, so either you have to run 32-bit Slackware, or install my multilib package set on top of your 64-bit Slackware  (multilib installation instructions here). The good news is that you do not have to install anything else to use the Steam client and play games. All the dependencies that I used to add to the steamclient directory are no longer needed. The necessary libraries are now all part of the “steam-runtime” included with the steamclient package.

It is highly recommended to have a NVIDIA/ATI powered graphics card inside your computer and use the proprietary binary graphics drivers for these cards!

Only if you want to be able to watch the game demo-video and promotional content in the Steam Store (inside the Steam client), you need to have the flashplayer-plugin installed. For 64-bit multilib systems that means, grab the 32-bit flash player plugin package, and use convertpkg-compat32 (part of my compat32-tools) to convert that package into a “compat32” package which can be used on a multilib Slackware64. Note that Adobe releases regular security updates for the Flashplayer, so be sure to check for updates to my package. You can keep an eye on the repository RSS feed if you don’t want to miss out.

Want to try? Install the steamclient, get Team Fortress 2 for free and start playing this adrenaline-powered multiplayer online game. And become the newest member of the Steam Slackware Group!

Have fun, Eric

Steam client for Linux is out of Beta

February 14, 2013 / / 23 Comments

steamThe Steam client for Linux is finally out of Beta! This is being celebrated by offering large discounts on all 54 Linux games which are currently available on the Steam platform. So if you wanted to play the Original Half-Life natively on Slackware, you only have to shell out a measly few bucks. If there is enough interest I will open up my Half-Life Dedicated Server “Eindhoven Aliens” from time to time when I am online and willing to get slaughtered. Which reminds me that I still have to write my blog article on how I setup that HLDS – it was not trivial.

I updated my steamclient package to version 1.0.0.27. Join the Slackware group on Steam Community if you use it.

Cheers, Eric

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