Former NVIDIA, Microsoft Developers Doing Lots Of The SteamOS Work

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Former NVIDIA, Microsoft Developers Doing Lots Of The SteamOS Work

A former NVIDIA engineer joined Valve some months ago and is responsible for lots of the work on SteamOS and their Linux support. A long-time Microsoft employee is also involved in designing SteamOS. Here's also a few other bits of information in my SteamOS adventures this evening...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU0Mzc

[dee.]

Let's hope they're not moles aiming to pull an elop.

[stiiixy]

A question in relation to the sound being choppy playing a video; I've had this before numerous times. Can anyone explain the possible reasons this occurs, expecially as it seems to be related to the video systems for some reason!

Also, has anyone tried importing their existing backups of Linux games in to SteamOS yet? I haven't had a chance to install it yet and wont yet for a day or two! Can you view network shares (SMB and/or NFS), or at least add them manually? I have no idea about the state of this OS.

[zeroepoch]

Steam Controller USB HID?

Is it possible that the Steam Controller is a USB HID device so it wouldn't require any special support from the kernel? Michael, did you try checking the X11 input devices to see if they are different from a normal system?

[benmoran]

Is it possible that the Steam Controller is a USB HID device so it wouldn't require any special support from the kernel? Michael, did you try checking the X11 input devices to see if they are different from a normal system?

Good question. The beta controllers are all wired, are they not? I wonder what the production ones will use for wireless. Bluetooth maybe, like PS3/4?

[asdfblah]

I managed to install it in virtualbox (although not completely.. not yet, some repos from valve are throwing a "Forbidden" error) from scratch (by using the debootstrap method: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apds03.html ), and it seems that the UEFI problem happens only because valve doesn't this packages in their repos: grub-pc-bin grub-pc. I'm still wondering why they didn't install those too...

I just downloaded them (plus some other packages: grub-common grub2-common ucf) from some debian repos, and it worked just fine.

BTW, here is the package lists from their repos (for 64 bits systems): http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos...amd64/Packages http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos...amd64/Packages http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos...ntrib/Packages You can get the whole list from http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/dists/alchemist/ by going from folder to folder and downloading the 'Packages' files. There are some things here that could be interesting: http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/ , in the conf/ lists/ and log/ folders..

Now, if only I could get a list of the packages installed in the disk images... and also, the name of the system user and groups, because I'm running the VM as root, hehe.

[GreatEmerald]

Ubuntu vs SteamOS? Why not Debian vs SteamOS, or Ubuntu vs Debian vs SteamOS? That would give more information on what the actual changes in SteamOS affect.

[elanthis]

There's also other former Microsoft employees on Valve's Linux team

You do realize that Gabe Newall himself is also a former long-time Microsoft employee, right? Valve wouldn't even have gotten far off the ground without the millions he made during his years at Microsoft and the ability to self fund most of Half-Life and get the initial version of Steam up and running.

Valve has a bunch of ex-Microsoft engineers working for them. This should not be surprising given how close geographically Valve and Microsoft are and the shear quantity of people joining and leaving a company of Microsoft's size every year. If you can find any decent-sized software company in the Seattle area (or practically anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, really) that doesn't have some ex-Microsoft people you've basically found a unicorn and _that_ would be news. :P

[Mike Frett]

Now how is this going to effect the system requirements already in place for all steam games (Ubuntu)?. They expect developers to go back and install Debian now, which is a lot harder to use than Ubuntu?. Not that I care really, Debian was a good base to build on but I rarely use a computer anymore; for some reason I just got bored. Burnt out I guess.

[timofonic]

Now how is this going to effect the system requirements already in place for all steam games (Ubuntu)?. They expect developers to go back and install Debian now, which is a lot harder to use than Ubuntu?. Not that I care really, Debian was a good base to build on but I rarely use a computer anymore; for some reason I just got bored. Burnt out I guess.

Why are you reading computer news in this website? :P