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Valve Releases Debian-Based SteamOS Beta

Posted by timothy on from the actually-sounds-pretty-cool dept.

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."

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Why does UEFI matter? by visualight · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Why does UEFI matter? by EmperorArthur · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You don't realize how much easier UEFI makes things until you figure it out and start using it.

      UEFI can do other fun stuff, but by default it runs "\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi" on the first fat32 partition it sees.
      No more dealing with trying to backup custom bootloaders, or trying to figure out why grub install isn't letting you dual boot. Just rename a shell with a default script to bootx64.efi and you're good to go. Hell, those shells even include their own editor.

      I wonder how many people realize that UEFI means that as long as a USB drive is fat32 they can just drag and drop the files without worrying about formatting the thing with a bootloader.

      --
      So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
  2. The "only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards" i by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  3. Re:Debian! by aaronb1138 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Valve forked the graphics subsystem. Keep forking and letting everyone be their own little fiefdom of incompatibility Linux... That's the way to the desktop (set top?)

  4. Re:Why nVidia only? by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that ATI drivers for linux have ALWAYS been terrible.