SteamOS Compositor Details, Kernel Patches, Screenshots

[asdfblah]

Those instructions are so bad. Making a real BIOS remix of the installer isn't hard, but nobody with the knowledge to do it has done so yet. I won't until the redistribution terms are made clearer

Are you sure?

(not sure if you shold trust it though...)
Again, it's DEBIAN, and AFAIK, the "redistribution terms" from Valve are clear: if you know what you are doing, do anything you want with it.

[directhex]

Are you sure?

(not sure if you shold trust it though...)
Again, it's DEBIAN, and AFAIK, the "redistribution terms" from Valve are clear: if you know what you are doing, do anything you want with it.

Yes I'm sure. Every set of instructions said "and when the installer falls, drop to console and do X". Doing better isn't hard, including making an isohybrid image with both UEFI and BIOS support.

[leech]

Yes I'm sure. Every set of instructions said "and when the installer falls, drop to console and do X". Doing better isn't hard, including making an isohybrid image with both UEFI and BIOS support.

Should be real easy to get a 'SteamOS' installed using standard Bios support. Step 1) install Debian Wheezy. Step 2) enable Steam repositories. Step 3) install SteamOS stuff. Done.

Hell, with the exception of the tweaked RT kernel, Debian Jessie already has steam in it's repositories, so if you were running Debian Testing, you could just apt-get install it, and quite possibly just install the RT kernel along with the AUFS support.

Guess it all depends on all of the tweaks they've added.

[Kano]

Debian wheezy has libc6 2.13 and SteamOS libc6 2.17. That means they recompiled everything against the new libc6 version. Of course the packages behave the same, i would basically use the steamos repository as addon to get latest mesa and other upgrades, i would even install the RT kernel from there. But it is not the other way around, you minimally need libc6 update or you need a hack for steam when you want to run it on wheezy. I update libc6 for Kanotix Special images, there you could try it even live. In the case you mount any hd partition and symlink a directory to ~/.local/share/Steam (be sure to use 1000:1000 owner in case of Linux filesystems, ntfs works fine as well) you could play your games from hd using a live system - using gfxdetect even with binary driver enabled. Debian kernel usually have got aufs patched in for use with Debian Live, i don't think that Valve added that patch intentionally on their own.

[directhex]

Should be real easy to get a 'SteamOS' installed using standard Bios support. Step 1) install Debian Wheezy. Step 2) enable Steam repositories. Step 3) install SteamOS stuff. Done.

Hell, with the exception of the tweaked RT kernel, Debian Jessie already has steam in it's repositories, so if you were running Debian Testing, you could just apt-get install it, and quite possibly just install the RT kernel along with the AUFS support.

Guess it all depends on all of the tweaks they've added.

It's not an RT kernel. That's misreporting by Phoronix.

[leech]

Debian wheezy has libc6 2.13 and SteamOS libc6 2.17. That means they recompiled everything against the new libc6 version. Of course the packages behave the same, i would basically use the steamos repository as addon to get latest mesa and other upgrades, i would even install the RT kernel from there. But it is not the other way around, you minimally need libc6 update or you need a hack for steam when you want to run it on wheezy. I update libc6 for Kanotix Special images, there you could try it even live. In the case you mount any hd partition and symlink a directory to ~/.local/share/Steam (be sure to use 1000:1000 owner in case of Linux filesystems, ntfs works fine as well) you could play your games from hd using a live system - using gfxdetect even with binary driver enabled. Debian kernel usually have got aufs patched in for use with Debian Live, i don't think that Valve added that patch intentionally on their own.

It does look like they're recompiling / repackaging things with their own name (much as Ubuntu does). But I do know that if you took Debian Wheezy and updated few packages to Jessie (libc6, steam and it's dependencies) then put them in a hold, it'd work just as well. Granted you'd still want to grab the kernel and nvidia driver from Steam's repositories.

But one thing I thought was odd, on Ars technica, it showed an 'Expert install' screen (which is standard in Debian's installer) but the odd part.. they said you can't partition the disks yourself, but right there on the Expert install screen, it shows the standard "Detect Disks" and "Partition Disks". Gonna try it out when I get home.

leech

[V10lator]

Hey guys, in here: http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos....debian.tar.xz is a patch called "defer-input-nodes-and-led-support" which seems to be Valves patch to the xpad driver.
It's content is: http://pastie.org/8579553

Is someone able to explain what it does and why the xpad module throws out warnings and errors (so fails to compile) when I apply this patch (to 3.13-rc2) ?