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STEAM announcements & updates 2013 - Year of the SteamBox

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drizzle

Axel Hertz
Why exactly are you using Linux again ?

Me? I'm a computer technician, I should know this stuff. Doesn't mean I have to like it or accept it as being good.

Also, it's amazing to run on System-on-a-Chip devices (like a Raspberry Pi, for instance) or to maintain servers on server collocation or rental services.

Edit: Oh, you mean why I'm trying to run Steam/TF2 on Linux? I want that Tux hat, of course.
 

zoku88

Member
More Linux adventures:

So I needed a newer version of the NVidia drivers, right? Steam told me I should look for it. Well, Ubuntu package manager told me I was using the newest drivers already. TF2 refused to launch, because I had too old video drivers.

Doing a little research, I found a script that would install the newest drivers for my VideoCard (http://ubuntuxtreme.com/howto/how-to-install-nvidia-drivers-304-64/). Said script ran for 15 minutes, because it decided it had to update my fucking Kernel AGAIN. This is a slow ass computer, doing an apt-get upgrade takes a while. However, this is not the first time that I needed to do a complete system upgrade so I would be able to install new Drivers for something, so it's not that unexpected.

Anyway, after that is done, I run Steam again and it promptly tells me that I should install the "nvidia-304" package for better compatibility... but, didn't I just spend the last 15 minutes installing packags for the new video driver?

I say screw it, let's try to run TF2 anyway. Oh, it's starting, good progress... "S3TC Texture Support not found, please install S3TC Texture Support". What the fuck? What is S3TC? Turns out it's some sort of OPENGL Texture Compression support and I need to manually install the "libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0" package. But... I just installed new video drivers, why wasn't that built in?

Let's try that nvidia-304 package thing.... Terminal, "apt-get install nvidia-304".. Oh, it found it. Good, it's only 113 megs. Let's see how it goes...
..
...

This goddamn server is the slowest piece of shit server I've ever encountered on the Internet. It downloads 3% of the file and the connection just stalls. I have to Ctrl+C out of it and repeat the apt-get command to get another 3%, rinse and repeat. It's been 10 minutes and it only downloaded 57% of the package.


God dammit I hate Linux so goddamn much.
Never do this for some as important as a video driver :-/ Especially when you don't know exactly what the script is doing...

This is what you should have done:
Code:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

As posted above, the same thing happened to me. Maybe they decided to remove daily sales from the main page for some reason. You can dig through the special list for 66% or 75% things to find them, however. I suspect there's also some news feed somewhere that lists them, but I don't know offhand.

Unity of Command: Stalingrad Campaign is today's deal at 66% off, $6.80 USD. It's apparently rated highly, but it looks like one of those strategy games that are for the hardest of cores, so I'm scared off. =P

Unity of command is actually the opposite. It's made for people who are not used to wargames.

Since you seem to know a bit about Linux, would you be able to help me solve my connectivity problems? If not, I will have to go and look for an Ethernet cable.

I'm not sure what you tried.

I see this mentioned somewhere on forums.

sudo modprobe -r rtl8192cu
sudo modprobe rtl8192cu swenc=1

This basically unloads the driver and loads it again with the option 'swenc=1'

From what I've been reading, the rtl8192cu driver isn't very good.

Actually, just to make sure, is it even loaded for you?

Do:

lsmod | grep rtl8192cu
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
I didn't even know there were still functioning Pentium 4's left on planet earth.

I also have an woking Athlon XP 3100 (I believe) if you want to talk about hardware that should no longer exist. Sadly, that's stored in pieces, as why would I even have that computer up and running.

I know this Pentium 4 is a stupid machine (it's my Backup Computer for my Backup Computer), but it's right here. I was pretty bored a couple hours ago and had nothing else to do, I might as well try to trun TF2 on this thing (as it works on Windows XP).

Good news though, it seems I've managed to upgrade everything.

Bad news: It seems the videocard in it (an old AGP 7800GS nvidia Videocard) doesn't have the required OpenGL support (It seems TF2 rquires OpenGL 3.0 to run, and this card only has support for 2.1).

It was fun anyway. I might make a bootable USB stick and run on my machine later today. The only downside of that is that I wouldn't have Internet to keep me amused while I battle Linux.
 

Wok

Member
How much do people think this hat is going to be worth?

At first, I thought 2 cents, just as much as a Dota 2 invite.

Now that I have tried installing Ubuntu and that I am unable to connect to Internet, I would say an earbud if the design is bad, two earbuds if the design is good.

Told you it wouldn't be as easy as you'd expected ;)

If I finally manage to get this hat, I am going to wear it all the time and might end up never selling it.
 
At first, I thought 2 cents, just as much as a Dota 2 invite.

Now that I have tried installing Ubuntu and that I am unable to connect to Internet, I would say an earbud if the design is bad, two earbuds if the design is good.
Told you it wouldn't be as easy as you'd expected ;)
 
At first, I thought 2 cents, just as much as a Dota 2 invite.

Now that I have tried installing Ubuntu and that I am unable to connect to Internet, I would say an earbud if the design is bad, two earbuds if the design is good.

Heh ok. I might see if I can write up a guide. Should be easy enough
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
This is what you should have done:
Code:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

This is why I think Linux is for Crazy People. Why do I have to manually add repositories and download versions related to my Linux-build when all I want is a new graphics driver?

Why can't I go to a place and download a file and install it like a normal person would? Does it have to be all cryptic repositories and cryptic package names? Where am I supposed to find this information?

Edit: also, doing that says I need "xorg-video-abi-11". Trying to install that package says there's no installation candidate.
 

zoku88

Member
This is why I think Linux is for Crazy People. Why do I have to manually add repositories and download versions related to my Linux-build when all I want is a new graphics driver?

Why can't I go to a place and download a file and install it like a normal person would? Does it have to be all cryptic repositories and cryptic package names? Where am I supposed to find this information?

Because it's easier, in the long run, to have all of your software managed by the package manager. It makes it so that, usually, you don't have to use google to find out:

A) If package X has an update
B) where you can find update for package X (and its dependencies.)

It also makes uninstallation easy.

I mean, if you have 100s of software on your machine, why would you want to manually manage all of them...

I don't even use Ubuntu, and I was able to find that repo in a few seconds...
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Because it's easier, in the long run, to have all of your software managed by the package manager. It makes it so that, usually, you don't have to use google to find out:

A) If package X has an update
B) where you can find update for package X (and its dependencies.)

It also makes uninstallation easy.

I mean, if you have 100s of software on your machine, why would you want to manually manage all of them...

I don't even use Ubuntu, and I was able to find that repo in a few seconds...

Except it never works for that exact reason: Everytime I need to upgrade anything software-related on my Linux machines, I have to spend 30 minutes looking shit up on the internet to find out that I had to first update this package, which was a requirement of whatever package I needed to update, and nowhere in the process this was streamlined to me.

Even adding that repository, I require some other package that the "nvidia-current" package requires, and I can't install it because there's no installation candidate for my Ubuntu version (I guess).
 

zoku88

Member
Except it never works for that exact reason: Everytime I need to upgrade anything software-related on my Linux machines, I have to spend 30 minutes looking shit up on the internet to find out that I had to first update this package, which was a requirement of whatever package I needed to update, and nowhere in the process this was streamlined to me.
I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. Are you upgrading just a single package or the whole system? If you upgrade the whole system, all packages that required other packages to be updated would automatically make the dependencies update as well. If you really are only trying to do a partial upgrade (upgrade only one piece of software), I'm not exactly sure how Ubuntu handles it, but I assumed it would also update the dependencies then, too.

Unless, for some reason, the software you were talking about wasn't installed through the package manager. Then of course it wouldn't tell you that dependencies needed to be upgraded either.

Even running that repository, I require some other package that the "nvidia-current" package requires, and I can't install it because there's no installation candidate for my Ubuntu version (I guess).
Hmm, you're probably better off asking someone in the Linux noob thread. A lot of people there actually use Ubuntu (unlike me, I use Arch.) The distros have two very different methodologies.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=395852&page=89

that Xorg ABI 11 is old, (current is 13).

I guess I should have asked a basic question first... which version of Ubuntu are you actually using? I would guess it's either 12.04 or 12.10, right?
 

MRORANGE

Member
The only people who will have the Tux hat is Gabe, Linus Torvalds and John Carmack considering how annoying it is to get TF2 running in Ubuntu.
 

wutwutwut

Member
This is why I think Linux is for Crazy People. Why do I have to manually add repositories and download versions related to my Linux-build when all I want is a new graphics driver?
A new graphics driver is massively complicated. Most applications aren't that complicated. For example, Steam itself is a file you download and run just like you would on Windows.
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
What the heck, I'm gonna install 12.10 Ubuntu from scratch and see if it works, gparted wasn't working anyway to install TF2

I'm installing Ubuntu on a thumbdrive and will also reinstall my Pentium 4 with the newest ubuntu (as I completly screwed myself about 10 minutes ago and I can't be bothered to fix it, so I'll just upgrade it).

I may also try to run the USB Flash Drive on my main machine and run Linux from it later. We'll see.
 

MRORANGE

Member
I'm installing Ubuntu on a thumbdrive and will also reinstall my Pentium 4 with the newest ubuntu (as I completly screwed myself about 10 minutes ago and I can't be bothered to fix it, so I'll just upgrade it).

I may also try to run the USB Flash Drive on my main machine and run Linux from it later. We'll see.

I did have a stab at installing ubuntu on a usbflash drive but the persistent file size was only 4096mb :s and I could not change it after booting into ubuntu :|



PS: 12.10 is going a lot better :) installing Steam now :D
 

Acidote

Member
I did install Ubuntu 12.10 to a 16Gb USB drive and still was almost 1 GB short to install TF2. I guess I have to do it differently. It recommended 2600MB for the OS, but I guess I have to cut from somewhere or look for a slimmer linux distribution.
 
Ok here is how I got steam running under linux. YMMW and there are probably a heap of better/quicker ways, but if you probably just want the hat it should work or close enough. I'm running a couple of years old Windows 8 box with an AMD card.

Big disclaimer...I didn't get TF2 running with this method, just Counter Strike and FTL. This is simply because I don't want to download all that 12GB of data for a hat (Australian internet here and the fuck is TF2 12GB?). But I imagine it will work just as well for it too.

--- TL;DR ---
* Download a Linux Lite iso
* Burn it to DVD or make a bootable USB drive
* Boot into it, run steam
* Maybe dick around with your file system if you want more space

--- Getting Linux Running ---
* Download the Linux Lite iso from http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxlite/ will be about 720MB. It comes with all the shits and bits you will need.
* Download the Universal USB Installer from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
* Run UUI and select "Linux Other" and the iso you downloaded above. Select a USB drive with 2GB+ and let it install.
* You now have a bootable USB drive with linux+steam.
* So reboot, you may need to press F8 or similar whilst booting to get a menu. Once you do, select the USB drive and you will see the next linux menu.
* Select the default option, which is to run linux in "live mode" (nothing is changed on your PC).
* When it pops up to login, type "root" for the username and just leave the password blank by pressing Enter.
* Ok so wait a while and you have linux running. First we need to get your network going. If your PC is not 20 years old this shouldn't be a drama. Click on the two computers in the bottom right hand corner and select your wireless connection or set an IP address or whatever. If you are not sure how to set up your network now is the time to learn.

--- Getting Steam Running ---
* Hopefully the first section was painless. This should be easier. Go to Menu > Games and run Steam. It'll probably update at around 175MB.
* Accept the T&C. Enter in your login details as normal and do your steam guard magic if needed.
* Right click your games and install
* Hopefully enjoy your hats

--- But hang on, that doesn't work because I don't have enough disc space ---
* Ok one problem you will have with this method is TF2 is a 10GB game and you are probably going to want to use your hard drive or your existing downloaded files depending on your USB.
* If this is the case you need to do a bit of file system manipulation which is getting out of scope. The basic steps are:
- Can't you just add a folder library to steam? Well you can, but the linux version doesn't seem to give you the option when you install some games to pick this folder. Oops.
- So close steam
- Go to the folder icon down the bottom left of the screen. Right click any hard drive you see there (you will see your own hopefully) and 'eject volume'. We do this because it isn't mounted in a way that is useable to steam.
- Now open up a command prompt. It is the black >_ icon.
- Create a directory, say "steam"
> mkdir steam
- Now you need to mount your harddrive. Chances are the command is something like
>mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/sdb1 steam/
- You should now be able to go into the steam folder and see all your windows files (use "cd" to change directory and "ls" to list files. If it isn't the right drive, back up with "cd .." and use
>umount steam
to unmount it and try again with a different drive. To find the right device /dev/sda1 or whatever, try
>df -h
and it will list them all out.
- Create a new directory like 'steam' and change to this, it should be empty.
> cd steam
- Now copy all the old steam installtion files over to this new folder
- cp -R /root/.local/share/steam/* .
- This will take a minute whilst everything copies over.
- You can now run ./steam.sh from this directory and you should have many GB of space to do with as you please.
- But won't this break the link on the desktop to steam? Well we are linux hackers now, so don't worry too much about that. You can however create a symbolic link from the old folder to the new one. > ln -s source destination or change the menu link.
* You should also be able to then create links to the old windows downloaded archive files or copy them over if you have them. Unfortunately I didn't.

Don't know if that will help somebody or not.
 

Acidote

Member
I'll try tomorrow installing Xubuntu or Lubuntu as I did today with Ubuntu. The one that uses less space and that's it.
 

MRORANGE

Member
--- But hang on, that doesn't work because I don't have enough disc space ---
* Ok one problem you will have with this method is TF2 is a 10GB game and you are probably going to want to use your hard drive or your existing downloaded files depending on your USB.
* If this is the case you need to do a bit of file system manipulation which is getting out of scope. The basic steps are:
- Can't you just add a folder library to steam? Well you can, but the linux version doesn't seem to give you the option when you install some games to pick this folder. Oops.
- So close steam
- Go to the folder icon down the bottom left of the screen. Right click any hard drive you see there (you will see your own hopefully) and 'eject volume'. We do this because it isn't mounted in a way that is useable to steam.
- Now open up a command prompt. It is the black >_ icon.
- Create a directory, say "steam"
> mkdir steam
- Now you need to mount your harddrive. Chances are the command is something like
>mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/sdb1 steam/
- You should now be able to go into the steam folder and see all your windows files (use "cd" to change directory and "ls" to list files. If it isn't the right drive, back up with "cd .." and use
>umount steam
to unmount it and try again with a different drive. To find the right device /dev/sda1 or whatever, try
>df -h
and it will list them all out.
- Create a new directory like 'steam' and change to this, it should be empty.
> cd steam
- Now copy all the old steam installtion files over to this new folder
- cp -R /root/.local/share/steam/* .
- This will take a minute whilst everything copies over.
- You can now run ./steam.sh from this directory and you should have many GB of space to do with as you please.
- But won't this break the link on the desktop to steam? Well we are linux hackers now, so don't worry too much about that. You can however create a symbolic link from the old folder to the new one. > ln -s source destination or change the menu link.
* You should also be able to then create links to the old windows downloaded archive files or copy them over if you have them. Unfortunately I didn't.

Don't know if that will help somebody or not.

This was the problem I was having with 12.04 :|

Thanks for the write-up, should help others.
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Again, as usual, updating everything seems to have fixed most (if not all) problems.

However, there's a pretty common problem showing up now:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/882966056532198187/

Apparently, one needs Experimental Drivers 310 for Nvidia cards to run the proper OpenGL extensions needed by TF2.

My Pentium 4 videocard (a 7800GS) is not supported by these drivers, it's only supported by 304 drivers. So, in other words, the Driver that works for my Videocard does not support the OpenGL call needed by TF2, even though the videocard is more than enough to run the game.

Bummer.
 

Jawmuncher

Member
The hat update turned me away from TF2 more than anything. Then again the update with weapon drops and such did that to.
(Can't recall if they were the same)
 

fallout

Member
Why are you guys trying to run Steam on Linux again?
4NiaSt5.jpg
 
So the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim is probably the best out of the current lot but I'm really having trouble trying to bring myself to play it. Had an initial abortive run with a new character build (stealth, ranged and light armor) and ran smack into Bethesda's shitty scaling and occasional rigid enemy encounters in a dungeon that made me dust off my old over-powered tank character.

Even with the relative ease through which I'm mashing through Solstheim with my heavy armor, one handed melee tank it's simply kind of dull to trudge through another sterile Bethesda content themepark. I'm not sure what it was that I found so engrossing about Skyrim vanilla that I hammered through the entirety of the game in a few short weeks and managed to nab all of the achievements. Whatever it was that compelled me to do so sure isn't present in the Dragonborn DLC. I don't have that same burning desire to go to and explore every undiscovered location that appears on my compass and fight my way through every generic dungeon.

At this rate I'll probably just try to hammer through the main story content of the dlc and move on to a different game.
 

zoku88

Member
OMG I can't mount any of my hard drives if I boot Ubuntu from a live-flash-stick.

Kill me now :D

Hmmm, are you sure you can't? Have you tried doing it through the terminal? I haven't used an ubuntu live cd in a while, but you can definately do it in other live distros, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for Ubuntu.

Unless your other hard drives are NTFS, I guess. Then it might be an issue of not having the ntfs-3g stuff installed.
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Hmmm, are you sure you can't? Have you tried doing it through the terminal? I haven't used an ubuntu live cd in a while, but you can definately do it in other live distros, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for Ubuntu.

Unless your other hard drives are NTFS, I guess. Then it might be an issue of not having the ntfs-3g stuff installed.

They're all NTFS (But the 30 gig one on the Pentium 4 is NTFS as well).

The error was pretty weird though: they were all identified properly, but if I tried to open or mount them, it would give me an error saying it's not possible and give me an error code of -999 (or something along these lines). fdisk -l wouldn't list the partitions either and would say something along the lines of "this is wrong"

I tried to boot into the Live"CD" one more time to get the proper error code and look it up, but I was getting a myriad of errors from the LiveCD USB Drive (authentication failed and simply lock on the ubuntu loading screen). I was going to try again, but I got sidetracked doing something else and can't be bothered today. Will probably try again tomorrow.
 

zoku88

Member
fdisk -l wouldn't list the partitions either and would say something along the lines of "this is wrong"

Huh, that is definitely not good.

How did you call fdisk -l, btw? Did you give it an argument? The default without an argument might not be what you actually want.

Try to call it on the harddrives themselves, ie:

fdisk -l /dev/sda
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Huh, that is definitely not good.

How did you call fdisk -l, btw? Did you give it an argument? The default without an argument might not be what you actually want.

Try to call it on the harddrives themselves, ie:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

Like I said, I was just quickly trying it out and didn't bother doing any research or anything, I just booted back into windows, complained on that message and went to do something else.

I do have three different SATA Controllers in here, two of them are 6gb controllers, and one of my disks is formatted as GPT as opposed to MBR (it's a 3tb drive). I'm certain those are issues. (the pentium 4, where the NTFS drive was properly mapped is running all IDE)

When I try it again tomorrow, I will certainly post here again, but I'm not too worried.
 

zoku88

Member
Like I said, I was just quickly trying it out and didn't bother doing any research or anything, I just booted back into windows, complained on that message and went to do something else.

I do have three different SATA Controllers in here, two of them are 6gb controllers, and one of my disks is formatted as GPT as opposed to MBR (it's a 3tb drive). I'm certain those are issues. (the pentium 4, where the NTFS drive was properly mapped is running all IDE)

When I try it again tomorrow, I will certainly post here again, but I'm not too worried.

Oh ok. When you try again tomorrow, when you list the partitions, you might want to try parted -l instead, since parted supports GPT, whilst fdisk does not.
 

Ketch

Member
So i'm downloading the Ubuntu windows installer now... I've always wanted to switch over to linux for the street cred, but I've always been too much of a wuss.

What are the chances I'll destroy my computer forever?
 

Blizzard

Banned
So i'm downloading the Ubuntu windows installer now... I've always wanted to switch over to linux for the street cred, but I've always been too much of a wuss.

What are the chances I'll destroy my computer forever?
You shouldn't be at risk of destroying your computer, but it is a good idea to use an external hard disk or something instead of your main hard disk, in case you mess up the formatting. :p
 
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