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SteamOS out now (beta)

S

sekrit

Banned
StalkerUKCG said:
I have a system that boots into XBMC and I can launch steam big picture mode straight from that. All using a Xbox controller. I have emulators launching from within steam also. What benefits would Steam OS provide for me?

Right now I can't see any.
Click to expand...

I have exactly same setup and i'm definitely waiting for steamos. It would be great base for xbmc install.
 
T

thefil

Member
sekrit said:
That new smooth compositor is the most interesting part for me right now. You can apparently install the new steamos stuff on regular debian install too. It's not a "true" steamos of course but nice for testing purposes. I'm pretty sure other distros like ubuntu would also work fine with it. I'll test this later. Here is some info http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395815055799/
Click to expand...

That sound dreamy. I run Arch as my main though, and setting that up might be more finicky. Maybe I'll look into using the source packages later.
 
M

Massa

Member
Durante said:
Nvidia is disliked by the more zealous part of the free software community due to providing closed-source drivers. That is understandable. However, their closed source OpenGL drivers work and are actually competitive feature- and performance-wise with their Windows ones (and even on Windows their OpenGL support and performance are already generally better). And that's what's important for a company like Valve when trying to put something like Steam machines on the market.
Click to expand...

Nvidia is disliked by the Linux/Mesa/Xorg/Wayland developers due to not providing any specs, documentation or code that would actually help them with their work. If it were up to them the Linux graphics stack would be stuck in the past even more than it is now, as their attitude completely blocks change. These are issues that both Intel and AMD don't face, and the zealous nature of some in the free software community has zero to do with it.
 
M

Mutanthands

Member
All I get is the GRUB command prompt when I try to start the system. Wiped the hard drive, and tried fresh again using the SYSRESTORE file. No luck, will try again tomorrow.
 
M

markot

Banned
AMD wants to push mantle and a console pc love fest.

Nvidia wants to push pc pc pc.

Its no wonder nvidia is closer to valve now then amd was.
 
S

slapnuts

Junior Member
StalkerUKCG said:
I have a system that boots into XBMC and I can launch steam big picture mode straight from that. All using a Xbox controller. I have emulators launching from within steam also. What benefits would Steam OS provide for me?

Right now I can't see any.
Click to expand...

Yeah..not really nothing here, at least yet. I do not see the big deal with this anyways. I am perfectly fine with WIndows gaming PC and PS4.

Yes it would be nice to see some major change on the PC platform but i am not complaining with what i currently have on the PC honestly. Add a PS4 to the mix and those two platforms fullfill most of my gaming needs. This entire SteamBox and SteamOS just reeks of failure imho
 
T

TheD

The Detective
Atruvius said:
Can you get virtual box to use your graphics card instead of a virtual graphics card? I have tried installing Ubuntu using virtual box but it ran pretty bad.
Click to expand...

No, the only way I know of to give a VM a graphics card is to have a PC with VT-D or AMD-Vi, running Linux with ether KVM or Xen hypervisor (maybe the baremetal VMWare ESXi or Hyper-V on windows server).
 
S

SneakyStephan

Banned
elite09 said:
Nobody is asking for that.



I agree. And i believe they should have released a closed ¿beta? for Steam Machines and wait until they could support AMD cards to get the public version out, seems to be most logical solution. This is just going to angry AMD users, not good for their platform.
Click to expand...

... as an amd user, wut?

Angry at amd maybe because their driver support continues to suck
 
A

Atruvius

Member
TheD said:
No, the only way I know of to give a VM a graphics card is to have a PC with VT-D or AMD-Vi, running Linux with ether KVM or Xen hypervisor (maybe the baremetal VMWare ESXi or Hyper-V on windows server).
Click to expand...

Ah, ok. Thanks. Perhaps I'll just install it using virtual box just to see how it looks, even though no game will probably work on it.
 
C

CreepingFear

Member
Based on watching the youtube videos, I'm not missing anything by not installing the beta. The desktop looks very much like other linux distros, although very limited right now and the actual steam software is just steam with big picture mode. I do look forward to hearing how the games play frame rate wise compared to the windows versions.
 
L

Last Hope

Member
Based on Debian? I thought Valve themself said it would be based only on the Linux kernel and their own in house GUI system. If this includes gnome, I wonder if that means Valve bit off more than they could chew.
 
T

Tenck

Member
abtom said:
What is the point of this OS right now? It's unfinished, runs only a handful of games, doesn't support a wide range of hardware (yet), and erases everything on your computer (supposedly).

Love Steam and PC gaming, but this thing is pretty useless in its current state from what I've read so far.
Click to expand...

They said most people who want it should wait till 2014. This is for people who absolutely want it now, and don't mind it not being a full product just yet.
 
D

Danj

Member
Is there any way to install this on a USB hard drive so I can try it on my native hardware without touching my existing disks? Presumably if I was to put it in VirtualBox I wouldn't be able to try games on it because it can't use my 3D hardware?
 
T

TheD

The Detective
drgambit said:
It's Linux, it won't get any better...
Click to expand...

So all those Linux distros with easy installers do not exist then.....

Danj said:
Is there any way to install this on a USB hard drive so I can try it on my native hardware without touching my existing disks? Presumably if I was to put it in VirtualBox I wouldn't be able to try games on it because it can't use my 3D hardware?
Click to expand...

Yes and yes.
 
C

chadskin

Member
Exuro said:
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
Click to expand...

Thanks for the video.
Looks pretty basic right now. Still a long, long way to go for them if they want to compete with Microsoft.

Is it possible to watch movies or listen to music from within the Big Picture UI? I believe Valve said something along the lines when they announced SteamOS. I'm personally still hoping Valve and the guys from XBMC team up to make Steam and XBMC work together seamlessly. It's a hassle right now, to say the least.
 
V

vasametropolis

Member
Grief.exe said:
I'm not very familar with Linux. So I could install the Ubuntu version of Mumble onto the Debian SteamOS? Or would I have to do some playing around with the files?

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
Click to expand...
If it's a .deb file, my novice Linux experience wants to say yes it should work. If it is, just give it a try. What's the worst that could happen haha.

Anyways, I guess my real question with SteamOS is that if it's just a version of debian running Steam in big bicture, why wouldn't I just keep using Ubuntu instead...

Edit: I checked out the link. I would say the Ubuntu version is not going to work. Those builds are specifically for different Ubuntu versions and don't seem to be standard debian packages
 
T

TheD

The Detective
Danj said:
While I realise those are literal answers to my questions, what I actually mean is: can someone tell me the method for installing this onto a USB hard drive without impacting my existing disks?
Click to expand...

Copy all data (you want to keep) off the USB hard drive, unplug the HDDs in your system and then boot from the USB key with the installer on and install it to the USB hard drive (that should work as long as the installer does not only work on internal HDDs for some reason).
 
A

angular graphics

Banned
MutonCommander said:
So SteamOS has a desktop mode after all. Interesting, very interesting.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think during the Engadget interview what Valve said must have meant that the OS is missing bundled apps because that's not their focus; they built it to play games, but Engadget sort of presented it like there's absolutely nothing you can do but launch BPM.

Now that we know it's not true, probably lots of applications will be ported/adapted/created for SteamOS by the community.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
Massa said:
mumble is in the Debian repositories, so assuming they're enabled it should be as easy as 'apt-get install mumble'.
Click to expand...

Indeed, looking around online, SteamOS seems to be based on Debian 7 "Wheezy ", so I would imagine that it would be quite easy to install mumble directly from the Debian Repositories.

I really need to read up on some instructions on how to install SteamOS.
 
D

Durante

Member
Jinroh said:
So how does it differ from a standard linux distribution exactly?
Click to expand...
The more significant things I read so far:
  • It uses a heavily tweaked kernel with some RT support
  • They use a their own customized lightweight compositor
It's actually a bit more customized than I expected.

Massa said:
Nvidia is disliked by the Linux/Mesa/Xorg/Wayland developers due to not providing any specs, documentation or code that would actually help them with their work. If it were up to them the Linux graphics stack would be stuck in the past even more than it is now, as their attitude completely blocks change. These are issues that both Intel and AMD don't face, and the zealous nature of some in the free software community has zero to do with it.
Click to expand...
Answer me this: if someone asked you what graphics hardware to buy, and his use case is that he needs to use modern high-performance OpenGL on Linux, which hardware manufacturer would you suggest to them? Because that's the situation Valve was in, and I think they made the right choice. Here is very recent data which I believe helps in motivating it.
 
Y

Ysiadmihi

Banned
TheD said:
Copy all data (you want to keep) off the USB hard drive, unplug the HDDs in your system and then boot from the USB key with the installer on and install it to the USB hard drive (that should work as long as the installer does not only work on internal HDDs for some reason).
Click to expand...

Not that it is a big deal, but is this really necessary? Isn't there a way to pick which storage device you want to install to?
 
undu

undu

Member
Durante said:
The more significant things I read so far:
  • It uses a heavily tweaked kernel with some RT support
  • They use a their own customized lightweight compositor
It's actually a bit more customized than I expected.
Click to expand...

By the RT support you mean it has a scheduler like RT_PREEEMPT or it has something more radical like a RTAI or Xenomai?

I haven't seen it, but I guess the compositor it's something similar to compton, very minimalistic and useful to use with any kind of window manager.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
^ the former

the infos so far

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzM
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzU
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzY
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0Mzc

@Michael: to clarify, since you are quoting me in this article. On closer inspection the 282 ../rt/all (sub-folder) patches, are largely (but not all, afaict) in linux-rt patchset - I haven't run a diff, just from browsing. (and no point in making a diff, since i would still need to recognize functions, etc - that would be spread out between patches i am not necessarily familiar with.. although, i am curious about a few bits that might make nvidia more rt friendly.)
Click to expand...

http://steamdb.info/blog/35/
 
undu

undu

Member
I see, let's see how much better it fares for latencies compared to standard kernels/schedulers.

It looks like I wasn't wrong about the compositor, looking at it's license, cool thing.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
Durante said:
Answer me this: if someone asked you what graphics hardware to buy, and his use case is that he needs to use modern high-performance OpenGL on Linux, which hardware manufacturer would you suggest to them? Because that's the situation Valve was in, and I think they made the right choice. Here is very recent data which I believe helps in motivating it.
Click to expand...

yeah... looking at one example here...

n4VMkhS.png



The Radeon R9 290 gets 76FPS less than the Geforce 770 and 30FPS less than the 680. And this is generally how it is for Radeon cards on linux. AMD still have a ways to go with their OpenGL performance in Linux , before they can compete with Nvidia. Yeah, AMD's drivers have been slowly improving, but still far from perfect.
 
W

wsippel

Banned
StalkerUKCG said:
I have a system that boots into XBMC and I can launch steam big picture mode straight from that. All using a Xbox controller. I have emulators launching from within steam also. What benefits would Steam OS provide for me?

Right now I can't see any.
Click to expand...
The underlying OS itself is (or should be) optimized for games. It's not just about the UI or controller support, it's about the shit that happens behind all that.
 
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