Fuduntu Gaming: A Steaming pile of fun (Round 2)
November 30, 2012 6 Comments
Steamed Fuduntu: Now with more games!
It’s certainly been awhile, hasn’t it?! No matter, good things come to those who wait and since you’ve all been the nicest bunch of boys and girls this side of the Milky Way, Santa’s come early this year. Alright, alright… Maybe I’m not here to give you anything still I come bearing gifts, the gift of awareness that Steam is officially working for Fuduntu! Yep, you read it right the first time.
You see, being the incorrigible gamer in the team I’ve been nagging our mostly benevolent lord and master fewt to support Valve’s latest flirt with the FOSS community. Somehow and against all odds (glibc updates, libX11 updates, etc.) Mr. Wyatt stepped up and ironed out a few more wrinkles in our quest to make Fuduntu the one true, fun, GNU/Linux distribution and it is with great satisfaction (and a few more grey hairs on my head) that I come before you today to recount my tale and how I got it to work.
It started a few weeks back when Venn Stone shared on Google+ the news that Steam had a few unofficial Linux repos, and I thought I might finally catch a break and it would work right out of the box, close but no cigar. It wasn’t until last night, when fewt himself noticed said repo that things really started moving along for Steam on Fuduntu and it went from 0 to 60 in no time. Shortly thereafter the updated and previously-missing packages found themselves in our Unstable repo.
It sounded too good to be true, which is precisely why it didn’t work right away. Turns out, in their baby steps into the GNUorld, Valve decided to use Ubuntu for their testing ground (something I may have not been particularly appreciative of, but still I was glad it happened) and in so doing they made it so it would work with Ubuntu and didn’t really care for anything else. Turns out we were missing yet another dependency which our fellows over at Canonical include by default, gksudo, which fewt also packaged and uploaded straight away. “Finally, Steam on Fuduntu! Woooooot!” thought I in my ignorance, t’wasn’t to be so for me. As I mulled it around and around in my head, and after fewt himself helped me trim down the list of possible reasons why it wasn’t working on my end, I decided once again to follow Venn’s advice: If you’re setting up a Linux gaming environment, use 32bit. Grab the PAE kernel if you must, but use 32bit. i686 it is then… And it’s been barely an hour or two (at the time of writing) since I first saw Steam running on my soon to be “Fuduntu exclusive” laptop… and all it took were a couple of long nights, 2 packs of cigarettes and a fresh install…
Now I’m just nitpicking, to be honest I’m delighted to finally have Steam for Linux. I’m still pissed Bethesda will not start porting their games to Linux, at least not for the time being, but if I can have all those games I purchased in the Humble Bundles, Valve’s very own titles and a few more Indies, I’m a happy camper!
I haven’t tested all those games you see in the screenshot above, but so far Amnesia: Dark Descent (launching from Steam itself causes a bug with the launcher, launching it from the ~/Steam/SteamApps/common/Amnesia The Dark Descent/run_steam.sh works) and World of Goo both work.
All of this just to say: Steam is now available through our Testing repo, if you’d like to take a whack at it go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and tick the Testing repo, then open up a terminal and run ‘beesu yum update’ followed by ‘beesu yum install steam‘ (this goes without saying but…) without the ticks.
How about you? Have you guys tried it? How did it go?
Let us know in the comments.
This was M4t3us straddling in for yet another long, long night for a much, much better reason this time.
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