Steam Gaming On PC-BSD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Gaming On PC-BSD

While Valve doesn't provide any official BSD binaries of Steam nor are any of the Steam game titles listed as supporting BSD, it doesn't stop some from trying to get their gaming fix on FreeBSD/PC-BSD...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg2MjQ

[dimko]

BSD for gaming

What a joke.
All 5 BSD gamers try really hard to make games work on it...
Tro-lo-lo

[mark45]

What a joke.
All 5 BSD gamers try really hard to make games work on it...
Tro-lo-lo

4, the one from Guatemala died last night.

[stqn]

Meh, I thought this article would be about a update to the Linux compatibility layer of BSD? :-/

[madjr]

I assumed would be wine, because if you want to play linux games just install damn Linux on another partition or build a steam box

[stqn]

I assumed would be wine, because if you want to play linux games just install damn Linux on another partition or build a steam box

Because of course everybody likes to stop all their programs and reboot under an OS they don?t like/know to play a game.

[zanny]

Because of course everybody likes to stop all their programs and reboot under an OS they don?t like/know to play a game.

What software available on the BSD's is not available under Linux? The BSD users mostly just don't want to have a heterogeneous ecosystem / don't like the GPL, neither of which are really UX considerations but personal preference.

[Luke_Wolf]

I assumed would be wine, because if you want to play linux games just install damn Linux on another partition or build a steam box

well in the long term... http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/PC-B...oadmap#target3

[Xaero_Vincent]

Good to see some new BSD articles Michael.

Yeah, the Linuxulator compabability layer isn't up to snuff these days. It still can only translate Linux 2.6.16 system calls and requires an old Linux base with an old glibc, older than what Steam for Linux requires as a minimum base to function.

FreeBSD has the best Wine support of any other BSD, besides OS X. NetBSD also supports it think but I imagine it's a bit buggy and alot of stuff doesn't work and OpenBSD support was totally broken--couldn't even do (Wine --version) without a patch and dropped support long ago. Not sure if Solaris still supports it.

One thing lacking from my understanding is 64-bit Wine support on FreeBSD? Has anyone had any success at getting 64-bit Windows programs in 64-bit Wine to work on FreeBSD 64-bit? The ports tree just has a 32-bit versions for FreeBSD 64.

[Luke_Wolf]

Good to see some new BSD articles Michael.

Yeah, the Linuxulator compabability layer isn't up to snuff these days. It still can only translate Linux 2.6.16 system calls and requires an old Linux base with an old glibc, older than what Steam for Linux requires as a minimum base to function.

FreeBSD has the best Wine support of any other BSD, besides OS X. NetBSD also supports it think but I imagine it's a bit buggy and alot of stuff doesn't work and OpenBSD support was totally broken--couldn't even do (Wine --version) without a patch and dropped support long ago. Not sure if Solaris still supports it.

One thing lacking from my understanding is 64-bit Wine support on FreeBSD? Has anyone had any success at getting 64-bit Windows programs in 64-bit Wine to work on FreeBSD 64-bit? The ports tree just has a 32-bit versions for FreeBSD 64.

That raises a good question... what 64-bit programs are there out there that actually work with wine? Wine can only reliably run dx9 games and previous, which other than maybe Far Cry and Crysis I can't think of any of them with 64-bit versions, and pretty much everything that's not a game is still 32-bit on Windows...