New Linux Distribution Ships Valve's Steam Pre-Installed

Released during CeBIT this week was a special edition Kanotix 2013 release, which incorporates auto-detection of the binary NVIDIA/AMD graphics drivers and it also pre-installs Valve's Steam Linux client.

"Kano", the developer behind the long-standing Debian derivative, announced the release in our forums. The binary driver auto-detection is used for the NVIDIA GeForce 9 series and later and the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, albeit users can still use the open-source Mesa stack too.

The 2013 CeBIT release of Kanotix is based on Debian Wheezy and uses the Linux 3.8 kernel and provides by default Wine 1.5.25, LibreOffice 4.0, GRUB 2.0, glibc 2.17, IceWeasel 19, and other new/updated packages.

Independently packaging and shipping the Steam Linux client was made easier last month after Valve clarified its license to let Steam be re-packaged by Linux distributions.