

Steam for Linux Beta Now Available  - mukyu
http://store.steampowered.com/news/9289/

======
pdknsk
If you're not in beta, but still want to play around with the client (without
games), install Steam and start it like this.

    
    
      wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb
      sudo dpkg -i steam.deb
      steam steam://open/store/ &
    

This bypasses the beta check (but still requires Steam account).

Next right click the Steam icon in the Unity launcher and pick Store. Pin the
icon to directly pick Store next time.

~~~
zfran
To then install TF2:

    
    
        steam steam://install/440

~~~
ThomasQue
It crashes for me when it tries to prepare the files :

    
    
        /.../Steam/steam.sh : ligne 113 : 31352 Erreur de segmentation  ${DEBUGGER} "${STEAMROOT}"/${PLATFORM}/${STEAMEXE} "$@"

------
drv
Here's a list of games available via Steam for Linux currently:
<http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux>

The link provided just redirects to the front store page for me:
<http://store.steampowered.com/browse/linux/>

~~~
tarice
I bet the people in charge of Steam for Linux are high-fiving whoever
coordinated with the Humble Bundle team.

At least half of the titles in that list appeared in Humble Bundles, and I'm
guessing a lot of those games wouldn't have been listed otherwise (Darwinia,
AYIM, etc.).

Slim pickings still, but much better than just TF2/SS3:BFE.

~~~
sho_hn
Actually, Introversion's games were on Linux before even the first Humble
Bundle existed, which made the later Bundle appearance a bit of an outlier in
that department.

The real surprise in the list is The Book of Unwritten Tales, which I think is
the only non-Valve/non-Croteam title in the catalog that was not available on
Linux before today. And in its genre (traditional graphical adventure) it's a
very high-profile title.

~~~
CrazedGeek
For what it's worth, Eversion wasn't available on Linux either. (Very fun
platformer, albeit quite short.)

------
viraptor
> “An overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they’re running
> the Ubuntu distro of Linux”

I'm sure the survey results were really valuable and contained only true
answers after they announced that "ubuntu" is the "right" answer for the first
beta... I hope they don't take them too seriously.

~~~
w1ntermute
Yep, I run Arch but answered Ubuntu because I knew I'd have no chance of
getting into the beta otherwise. No doubt someone will manage to create an AUR
package for Arch that uses the Ubuntu version of Steam. Unfortunately, I
wasn't selected, so I have no way of knowing when I'll actually get to try it
out.

~~~
AYBABTME
There's this:

<https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/steam/>

~~~
asdfaoeu
Does it work without being accepted into the beta?

I would try but I'm at work currently.

~~~
Clocwise
The first time I connected it didn't work, but I put in the command to
download tf2 (which didn't download) and after that it seemed to work fine, I
could talk to my friends and download/play my HIB games.

------
mukyu
<http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb> (Ubuntu 12.04,
supposedly is only supposed to work for people in the beta)

~~~
ajross
Augh. Some really craptastic distro-specific code in there. The wrapper script
tries to detect missing dependencies on its own (gee... aren't package
dependencies already handled by something, maybe the package manager?) and
install them via "gksudo apt-get ...". Sigh...

Valve: come on guys, get it right. Look at how Chrome or Dropbox do this for a
clean example. Basically, you define your own repository and your "install
now" link simply adds it (and its key) and pulls your package via
apt/yum/zypper/whatever.

~~~
jvert
Those things are explicitly added post-install because a package can't have
cross-architecture dependencies and not all the 10.4 packages support
multiarch. For example, if your 32-bit package depends on xboxdrv, it can't
install on an Ubuntu 10.4 x64 system. (ditto for libappindicator1, jockey-
common, etc) I don't see how defining our own repository helps this problem at
all. (and isn't what dropbox, chrome, etc. do anyway)

Thanks for the feedback though.

~~~
ajross
Hah! I knew you guys were watching. First, I'm quite certain that is what
dropbox and chrome do, but I'll leave research to you if you like.

And yes: getting cross distro (and especially multilib) support working is a
big mess. But what you're doing is just awful. The scripts as-is are
completely unusable on a Fedora box, because you've mixed "maintain the
package installation" with "check for updates" with "run the binary" in a way
that can't be cleanly separated. I'd literally have to rewrite most of your
stuff just to use it, and that's dumb. Other providers (Skype is another good
example, by the way) don't have this problem. Please study their solutions.

~~~
pja
Seconding this: Doing a post-post-install in a script installed in /usr/bin is
horrible!

Is targeting Ubuntu 10.4 a hard requirement? I suppose it's the last LTS
release, but surely the users Valve is targetting would almost all have
upgraded past 10.4 by now, and the 12.04 LTS release has already happened.
Anything more recent than 11.04 has proper mutli-arch support in dpkg/apt so
you can specify that your package needs both 64 and 32 bit versions of some
packages.

Your approach seems extremely fragile: is seamless 10.04 support such a
necessity?

Incidentally, your compiled binary is compiled against a more recent libc than
was shipped in Ubuntu 10.4, so it will currently refuse to run on 10.4 anyway.
I'm guessing you compiled in on an Ubuntu 12.04 install, since it has a hard
requirement for a libc version 2.15 or above. This means it won't run on
anything older than Ubuntu (12.04), nor will it run on the current or the next
Debian release.

~~~
pja
Ha! After some gruesome hackery, I got it running on the Debian testing
release.

A few small bug reports:

1) Your code to check who is in the closed beta is clearly not working :)

2) In the install dialog, asking whether or not to "Create a start menu
shortcut to <game X>" is clearly meaningless :)

3) For some reason, Psychonauts is in my library (I own a copy on Windows),
but I can't install it. Once past the dialogs, the install complete instantly
& the gui believes it to be installed, but (unsurprisingly, since nothing has
been downloaded) it won't run. Installing WorldOfGoo works perfectly.

4) You're re-setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH somewhere, which means that I can't
actually play any of the games, even though I can install them, because
they're finding the wrong libraries.

5) Running the games directly from the command line doesn't work, because they
can't find a running steam instance to authenticate against, even though steam
is running fine (this might be expected behaviour at this point, even though
it works under windows obv.) I suspect this is related to (4): forcibly
preloading everything in .steam/bin fixes the linking problem at least.

The Steam GUI seems perfect though: responsive & the look and feel is much the
same as the Windows version. Bravo!

~~~
pja
NB. Big Picture mode is lovely: I'd never played with it under windows.

~~~
pja
And it works really well with the open source radeon drivers too!

------
sown
If you break your ubuntu 12.04 install because nvidia driver 304 breaks,
here's how you fix it. Hopefully you made backups of your x config files (it's
a selectable option when you install new nvidia drivers). If it's x is truly
broken, then you won't see any windows or GUI. Hit ctrl-alt-F1 and login to
your user, then do this

    
    
       sudo service lightdm stop
       sudo nvidia-uninstall
       sudo apt-get install --reinstall nvidia-current

~~~
knome
Yeah, I managed to kill X by installing 310 after having installed 304. It was
managing to put 304 in the kernel while using 310's interface to it. Removing
the packages for both and then installing just 310 fixed it.

------
viraptor
For users of Arch Linux: <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/steam/> \- it was
also a very quick hack:

First Submitted: 2012-11-06 19:06

------
husam212
This is great for a closed beta, I thought its gonna be a farm of bugs with
almost nothing working ... I really appreciate steam team for their hard work,
I hope we see hardcore gamers soon using Linux.

------
jiggy2011
I run it and it strongly recommends that I install a new nVidia driver that is
marked as "experimental".

I know that it's not fair to dump on a beta but the interface is _really_
unresponsive even compared to the Windows version and half the time I can't
even drag windows around.

Looks like this still has some way to go.

~~~
zfran
Working perfect on Archlinux i368 with XFCE. Way more responsive than in
Windows for me.

~~~
vhost-
Did you find a write up on getting it to work with Arch?

~~~
zfran
no, I just extracted the .deb file and put its contents where they should be
for the client to run.

    
    
       ar x steam.deb
       tar xf data.tar.gz
       cp -r usr/ /

------
JamesArgo
Who would have expected this two years ago? And Nividia finally released a
decent driver.

------
doki_pen
So annoying that I keep clicking on steam articles and I still can't use it on
Linux.

------
trotsky
I guess we all have to pay more than the average to get left 4 dead 2 added to
the bundle.

------
thedangler
I know it is only in beta but all this "how can I get it to work" talk makes
me think it is not user friendly yet.

Windows and Mac it is simple as download and go. But with Linux there seems to
be issues and work arounds.

Still not for the average user.

Look at all the comments.

~~~
km3k
It's a CLOSED beta. Not intended for the average user yet. It'll be easy once
they've worked out the bugs.

~~~
acomar
It will possibly still require workarounds for non-ubuntu users though, the
official sources are only citing compatibility with Ubuntu as a goal. That
said, every distribution will likely have a package available through non-
official sources. Arch for example already has a working user package for the
current client. And I can also confirm that it is slow and buggy as was to be
expected.

~~~
ricardobeat
If you are not a Ubuntu user, odds are that you won't mind the trickery
required.

