SteamOS 1.0 Is Based Upon Debian Wheezy

[AJSB]

I don't get why they recomend 500GB HDD on one hand and in another they demand 1TB to install SteamOS.

Is it related to "mirroring" option that let us recover everything is something goes wrong with instalation ?

In that case , i assume that if you try to install SteamOS is a 500GB HDD, it will be "split" in two of 250GB with 2nd 250GB used to mirror and recover the 1st 250GB ?

TIA,
AJSB

[BSDude]

Nah, probably they weren't going to use Ubuntu in the first place. If you need milk, go straight to the cow... or something.

nah, it's more like go straight to the producer instead of the store so that you circumvent the store tax. Going to the cow is pretty much the NIH thing

[dee.]

Does anyone else think Canonical might have asked for Valve to pay licensing fees in order to base SteamOS off Ubuntu, and that this is what led Valve to basing SteamOS off Debian? (look up the recent Linux Mint controversy for reference)

Nah, probably they weren't going to use Ubuntu in the first place. If you need milk, go straight to the cow... or something.

[dee.]

Because some newbies have the idea torrent == virus, is my guess.
Also, some total suckers might fall for a fake.

People who are that green behind the ears shouldn't attempt to install an OS in the first place though...

[Serge]

Does anyone else think Canonical might have asked for Valve to pay licensing fees in order to base SteamOS off Ubuntu, and that this is what led Valve to basing SteamOS off Debian? (look up the recent Linux Mint controversy for reference)

[intellivision]

And it uses sysvinit, nothing surprising there.

[Awesomeness]

What do you mean by "Gnome is hiding behind Steam"? Are you talking here about the entire Gnome Shell, or just some Gnome packages needed by the Steam client?

Steam for Linux uses Chromium as web engine. Chromium in turn requires GTK and related libraries, so there is obviously some Gnome stuff.

[ssokolow]

Because some newbies have the idea torrent == virus, is my guess.
Also, some total suckers might fall for a fake.

I thought that was a solved problem with the "or, alternatively, you can max out your downstream and help take load off us by using this official torrent" design.

Either way, what they really should've done is used Metalink's support for transparent HTTP negotiation to serve up a Metalink file to compatible download managers (eg. KGet). (Basically, what Novell does with their OpenSUSE ISO download links.)

Since Metalink supports listing torrents as mirrors, that can be combined with a web-seeded, trackerless torrent to transparently switch anyone with a compatible download manager over to BitTorrent-backed download. (BurnBit lets anyone easily add this part to their downloads as long as their HTTP server allows resuming.)

Also, since Metalink files can embed hashes (or even PGP signatures), the download manager can auomatically do hash verification on the resulting file, regardless of what mix of mirrors it was downloaded from.

With that kind of infrastructure, it's easy to retrofit the hoster's site and it's transparent and automatic improvement for users with compatible download managers:

1. Initial seeding of the torrent swarm can be done by their usual CDN.
2. Download managers which support Metalink and BitTorrent will receive a Metalink file, automatically use BitTorrent as a scalable CDN, and verify the hash.
3. Download managers which just support Metalink will receive a Metalink file, use the HTTP CDN, and verify the hash.
4. Download managers which don't support Metalink can be served a direct link to the file as usual by using HTTP header-based negotiation.

For extra reliability, they could also include a Content-MD5 header so that download managers which don't do Metalink still have an option for automatically verifying completed downloads.

[deanjo]

Because some newbies have the idea torrent == virus, is my guess.
Also, some total suckers might fall for a fake.

Na, that can't be it. Especially when valve says this release was really only for the "linux hacker".

[forgiver]

Only took 25 mins off that tracker.

I can't test it as I don't have a spare machine. Looks like currently this is an openelec style install appliance, in that it requires the entire machine.