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Valve Releases Debian-Based SteamOS Beta
An anonymous reader writes that, as promised, "Valve has put out their first SteamOS Linux operating system beta. SteamOS 1.0 'Alchemist' Beta is forked from Debian Wheezy and features its own graphics compositor along with other changes. Right now SteamOS 1.0 is only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards and uses NVIDIA's closed-source Linux driver. SteamOS can be downloaded from here, but the server seems to be offline under the pressure."
An alternate submission links to another article about the use of a Debian base system as well as an unofficial torrent.
The one distro to rule them all!
When will the clods learn... need to share something big to a lot of people? TORRENT!
No love for Radeon :(
You are screwing a large group of people by doing that. Either that, or someone funding came their way to ignore AMD.
Seeing as i cream my pants every time Valve announces something, it is now time for some new underwear.
At least it isn't like the time I got an auto-reply to my job application at Valve. Sure, they didn't end up hiring me into their utopia, but if you ask me one shitty bed is a fair price to pay at heroin-like bliss.
UEFI boot support is in the list of HW requirements, which I've managed to avoid so far. There's no mention of TPM but maybe that's the reason?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Maybe they underestimated the demand for their Beta. People seem to be going nuts over it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
is there any way to turn off that horrible beta comment mode?
Valve said people should wait a bit before trying the OS anyway, so no surprise here even if they did plan on a release of SteamOS on Steam.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Viva la GaBEN!
Valve said that weenies should wait a bit before trying the OS.
The Catalyst and Mesa drivers are present on the system, but SteamOS Beta 1 is being advertised as NVIDIA-only.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzY
Although Debian is not one of my desktop distros (which are Gentoo and NixOS), I recognize that it has become the most reliable and best supported distro with the largest community and the most respected pedigree. It's also the most common base or parent for other distros like Ubuntu, so clearly it has the largest slice of the pie. And here's a little secret that is no secret: it just works.
I use it occasionally on little ARM boards like the awesome BeagleBone Black, where you have to overwrite the pile of junk Angstrom distro that comes on the board out of the box. Debian is totally painless and just works in that role. If you need a replacement distro that you can depend on, Debian never disappoints.
It's the "distro franca" of Linux, the GOTO choice for those who don't like pain.
They probably don't want to hear any square pegs complaining that they only get 2 fps out of the AMD drivers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not required, supported. The list is supported hardware. I would assume standard BIOS is supported as well but they wanted to point out that newer UEFI only boards are also supported.
Seems you got modded up, despite being WRONG. UEFI booting is required for the installer, which is why UEFI Support was listed as a hardware requirement in the FAQ you looked at. The requirement is also mentioned further down in the FAQ. Also reference:
http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395741989999/
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/12/valve-releases-steamos-beta-early-build-your-own-system-requirements/
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
Is this some sort of hipster, Ruby on Rails, hyper-ironic moderation or something?
Where the hell did that come from?
and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming
An Anandtech review points out that the integrated GPU in Ivy Bridge (previous generation Intel Core) runs Skyrim playably: 46 fps at 720p. From what I've read about the PS3 port of Skyrim, the PS3 doesn't do much better. And because indie PC games tend to be lower budget, they also tend to be lower detail, which means they just might work on Intel.
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
But wouldn't it be harder to boot from USB on a UEFI system? Most UEFI systems that I'm aware of default to Secure Boot with Microsoft keys. On the other hand, I guess people smart enough for beta are smart enough to figure out how to go into UEFI configuration and turn off Secure Boot.
He's probably referring to how the modding at sites like Digg and reddit went to hell after the hipsters (many of whom are also Ruby on Railers) showed up. Utterly stupid shit ends up getting modded highly by these people, and sensible content is modded down. Pretty much like we are seeing in this very thread, in fact!
What you describe is nothing new. It's something that smart people knew very well by 1994. Debian is indisputably the best Linux distribution around in every practical measure, and that has been the case for years now.
It is the distro with the best packaging system. It is the distro with the best variety of packages. It is the distro with the best package maintainers. It is the distro with the best release practices. It is the distro with the best community. It is the distro with the best reliability. It is the distro with the best stability. It is the distro with the best cutting-edge version. It is the distro with the best experience in a huge range of usage scenarios.
As far as general-purpose distros go, there's really no reason to even consider any of the others. In my opinion, they're all inferior to Debian in one or more ways. The sensible thing to do is to just use Debian, and get the best experience right away.
He's probably referring to how the modding at sites like Digg and reddit went to hell after the hipsters (many of whom are also Ruby on Railers) showed up.
Seconds after opening?
Secure boot was only recently added in v2.2.
And every (non-Apple) x86-64 PC and PC motherboard since the release of Windows 8 has shipped with Secure Boot.
10s if not 100s of millions of shipped systems predate that by many years such as every Intel Mac, Itanium systems from both Intel and HP, etc.
I thought Intel Macs were just EFI, not UEFI. And according to the FAQ, this distro is designed for x86-64, not Itanium. I understand Windows 7 Service Pack 1 for x86-64 supports UEFI, but did most Windows 7 PCs come with UEFI pre-2.2, or did they come with legacy BIOS?
Nah, Digg and Reddit were generally fine until about mid 2008 or so. That's when the Ruby/Mac/iPhone/Web 2.0/"hipster" fanaticism went mainstream, and flooded those sites and others with idiocy that remains to this day. Their communities were actually decent for a few years prior to then, since they were mostly made up of people with university-level education, and some sort of a technical or scientific background. Nowadays, these good people are massively outnumbered by those with a more useless background (like the social "sciences"), those who never even made it to university in the first place, the chronically unemployable, and the social rejects you see working the counters at coffee shops.
His first sentence is all about ejaculating uncontrollably into his own clothing, somehow because of video games. Interesting, perhaps, but it surely is not insightful.
Actually, his first sentence makes a cognitive leap from observing an involuntary visceral reaction to the Valve branding, to concluding that it is now time for some new underwear. An average slashdot moderator is not in the habit of thinking this far ahead.
Please don't support a DRM Monster that is Valve/Steam... you're better of buying from more reliable distributors.
I just can't fathom why people would get excited about one of the worst companies in the world that quite frankly go hand-in-hand with MPAA and all those types when it comes to their business models and consumer protection.
In reality, Steam/Valve is a totalitarian empire and like a tick it needs to be removed from the fabric of society.
No, really... are you new to this Linux thing?
Debian is currently on version 7. If you take the Half of 7, you end up with 3. Half Life 3 will launch as a Linux exclusive!
Yes. Start visiting another site. The very first comments when the beta went live were about how shitty and wasteful the layout was. No one cared, obviously. Now that Slashdot is throwing the last positive thing it had left in the shitter, it's time to start phasing it out.
Imagine if they had chosen Shuttleworth's os. Now they still support his os, but also many more, apart from itself.
Hail Debian, the mothership.
They might get in trouble for shipping the proprietary Nvidia drivers if it is shipped together with the Linux kernel which is GPL.
Because those using Steam already have Big Picture, which is essentially SteamOS, but not Linux. What's the point of letting you download the OS through Steam when all of the essential functions exist within Steam itself?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is the distro with the most hyperbole.
But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Which is where an online store like Google Play Store or Steam has an advantage over box sales: it can check your machine against the system requirements and hide the Buy Now button.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware
Then games that scale better to low-end hardware will end up with more sales to people with low-end hardware. Ideally, the same game would be able to produce PS3-class graphics on an Intel system and PS4-class graphics on a stronger system.
Any game made before ~2009 will run just fine on an ivy bridge laptop.
Saying that just days before 2014. Rather like saying pretty much anything made in 2000 will run a game from 1995. ;)
People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
the CPU along is $329 bucks on Newegg :(. The you need a Motherboard (and if you buy a cheapo you'll take a big performance hit. Then there's RAM, a hard drive, case and power supply, and finally the 'Microsoft tax'
I love the idea of high performance integrated graphics to replace my console, but the trouble Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did. I hadn't noticed it for years, but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware. Even the PS4/XBone are barely profitable. The cost of decent Intel hardware would have to plummet (or the Tegra 5 would have to be dirt cheap) for this to really work long term...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You mean like Slashdot?
and finally the 'Microsoft tax'
The article is about the lack thereof, unless you're referring to some patent royalty.
Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did.
But not quite so much because the other console makers have caught up in price. The first commercial Steambox will cost $500, the same as an Xbox One. Hopefully by then, Radeon drivers for SteamOS will have caught up.
but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware.
If an operating system is a component of a computer system, then Valve is subsidizing development of this component.
The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.
The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)
N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic system. Red Hat was better with interfacing to Novell networks, but not hugely.
OTOH, apt-get was far superior to RPM. I'm not certain that it still is, but as I don't like LILO and don't want to prevent my disks from being read by other partitions (SELinux...don't remember the package name), I find Debian preferable, so I haven't kept checking. A few years ago YUM had improved enough that it was nearly comparable to apt-get, especially as one could have a synaptic front-end on either.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.