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Gamer Rewrites Valve's Steam Installer For Debian

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Gaming on Linux is growing fast right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu, but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you're using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop? If you're a programmer called GhostSquad57, you rewrite the installer for Debian. GhostSquad57 uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday, and has since reached out to the Linux community."

20 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.

    1. Re:big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.

      Even less of a big deal when you check out NEW.

    2. Re:big deal by phorm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And Mint is for people who want more packages but dislike the direction that Canonical has been taking with Gnome3 etc...

      (it also works with the stock Steam installer)

    3. Re:big deal by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, actually they do. Debian, Mozilla and Apache are the ones run by shadowy not-for-profit legal foundations (aka "charities"), but Canonical, on the other hand is a a for-profit corporation is actually selling your demographic info to advertisers just like Facebook and Apple.

    4. Re:big deal by jgtg32a · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ubuntu is an African word that means "I can't configure Debian"

    5. Re:big deal by TheDarkener · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've been using Debian 'testing' as a desktop (and a netbook for that matter) for many years now. I used Ubuntu for about 4 years at home and with my business clients (I'm a network engineer), roughly from v6.10 -> 10.04 but switched back because of the "will not fix" developer mentality to those who wanted functional packages from an LTS release. There was always something major that was broken, always with the carrot-on-a-stick, "Just upgrade to the latest release and use PPA from JoeSchmoe" answer when you just wanted to use your computer. It kept me for a while, but it got reeeeal tiring.

      Debian has always "just worked" on my desktop. It's also a great LTSP sever, serving my kitchen and livingroom thin clients. With all of the good stuff that the Ubuntu/Canonical folks do getting backported to Debian, I feel like Debian testing is "Ubuntu Stable".

      --
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    6. Re:big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Debian is a Klingon word that means "I'm scared of Slackware"

    7. Re:big deal by marcello_dl · · Score: 3, Informative

      You should remember that there is also debian testing, which currently is debian wheezy. As stable becomes too old, testing become more of a viable alternative. I ran into more problems with kubuntu than sid, and testing is way better than sid for normal users, because upgrades are less radical.

      I also had a smooth experience with debian stable, if you want to run newer software too you could make a chroot with sid or testing, or consider the LD_LIBRARY_PATH option: at home I am running wheezy, plus the fglrx-legacy driver from experimental, using a closed source client with libraries gotten from ubuntu, and the resulting frankenstein has not had one hiccup.

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    8. Re:big deal by dcollins117 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ubuntu is an African word that means "I can't configure Debian"

      It's funny because it's true. As a windows user who wanted to learn how to use linux (15 years ago or so) I had the catch-22 issue of installing and configuring system I knew very little about. So it was crucial for me that the installation "just worked" to get a working machine to learn on. I tried Debian first and got no where, then tried Ubuntu and it "just worked".

      Ubunutu is far from perfect, but it works good enough for new users that they can learn what they need to in order to abandon it once they tire of Canonical's shenanigans.

  2. Not GNU/Steam by ButchDeLoria · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not free enough, 2/10 would not install.

  3. Wow Slashdot! by bennyp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Check out this headline: Linux guy edits script to better suit his setup. Let's get this to the front page NOW!

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    could it be?
    1. Re:Wow Slashdot! by zigfreed · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's worse than that. This is a Slashdot discussion about a Reddit thread, with a third site intermediary.

    2. Re:Wow Slashdot! by RocketRabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But how else can "anonymous reader" engage Dice Holdings' genius marketing team to promote thepowerbase.com's awesome news aggregator?

      I think you are missing the point of these slashdot stories. They are pure SEO spam, designed to uprank whatever shitty site is giving us a synopsis of what is happening at another site.

      It's really too bad the internet took off and was noticed by business and advertising types. We need a modern day digital Jesus to upset the money changers' tables.

  4. Whoop-dee-do for Debian by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    # layman -a gamerlay
    # layman -S
    # emerge steam-meta

    Done. Been working since the middle of the beta for Gentoo users, and that distro doesn't even use .deb files natively. So... um... congrats, Debian? Nice to see you're still old and slow to react? I guess?

  5. Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It depends on how you determine popularity. Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation, it's impossible to know how many installs of a given distro are out there. Mint may have the most pageviews or the most downloads in the last X months, but it doesn't mean it's the most widely installed.

    If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.

    I'm not saying this is the case, just that it's almost impossible to figure out the most popular Linux distro. It's also important to point out that Mint is to Ubuntu what Ubuntu is to Debian... if Debian stopped, Ubuntu would die and if Ubuntu stopped then Mint would die.

  6. Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. by Arashi256 · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's a donation page, numbnuts.

  7. Re:What's the chance of a slackpkg installer? by StarTuxia · · Score: 3, Informative

    It has been out for awhile, courtesy of Alien Bob: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/survey-results-for-linux-gaming-on-steam/#comments

  8. Typical Linux geek by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 5, Funny

    would rather be hacking the game than playing it.

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  9. Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation,

    Bullshit excuse. They do request updates, don't they? Its not hard to tell who's using your Linux distro when they come to you for patches.

    If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.

    Yes, if you picked a particular 5 millisecond period and just used that as a basis for all of your extrapolation, but when you look at it on average, that sort of thing doesn't matter.

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  10. Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hate to break it to you, but most downloads on Steam are going to ask you to pay for them too.

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