Investigating The Steam Linux Client Continues

For those that haven't been paying attention to our recent coverage of Valve's Steam Client / Source Engine coming to Linux, last month we discovered Linux references in the Steam Mac OS X client and other Linux support references, which that combined with word from sources yielded no doubt that Steam/Source is coming to Linux. We ended up even finding the Steam client binaries that are actively being worked on.

The Steam Linux client still appears to be heavily in development, but the real breakthrough came on May Day when members within the Phoronix community managed to get the Steam Linux client running up to the point of showing the log-in window. This came after several independent enthusiasts were tracing the calls made by the closed-source content delivery program and making modifications to fix certain issues to get the client running further along.

This caught the interest of many even though the client still isn't useful for gamers, yet. Their binary patch has been downloaded hundreds of times and in fact our IRC channel (#phoronix on FreeNode) has more than twice the usual number of people present as they follow the work being done by the community to try to investigate the Steam Linux client more and hopefully get more of the client running prior to Valve's official announcement of their Linux support.

For those not following our IRC channel actively, logs are available via our IRC archives. There also continues to be a lengthy forum discussion that is ongoing as more Linux users continue to investigate these Linux builds.