News - Valve to ship Steam Machines to testers starting from tomorrow

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't want to build a whole new "console" and install the OS to play my steam library, but the streaming part has me interested. Is there a chance that the streaming functionality would be do-able on other machines/operating systems? My HTPC is running Ubuntu so it shouldn't be THAT hard, right?

My Fedora box required me to type "yum install steam" and most of it seemed to install to the point that I could download the few Linux compatible games that I had.

The packaging seems to have broken dependencies though, as trying to run Portal wasn't successful. Guessing I need some old 32 bit libs that aren't currently installed.

Why is Steam a 32 bit platform?? SteamOS seems to require a EUFI BIOS which implies to me something modern enough to run 64 bit code.

Sadly at that point I fired up Minecraft to make sure the video card was working fine, and it was so that was the rest of the evening gone

Edit to add: Give it a go. I bought HL2 and Portal for Windows ages ago, both were available to download under Linux without me being gouged to buy them again which was a worry I had.

[virtuo]

I've already got the normal steam client running (slowly) on my HTPC. I've got a tiny lttle nvidia 210 in there for video decoding and HDMI output so it won't really do anything but very basic games. I very much like the idea of streaming from my PC that's sat in the attic room. I take it that the normal Steam client must have "Send" functionality somewhere, so I just need to work out how to receive those streams without having SteamOS on my HTPC, which is already set up with various things that I don't want to get rid of.

Or does the desktop steam client already do it (I'm quite new to Steam)?

[DanceswithUnix]

I've already got the normal steam client running (slowly) on my HTPC. I've got a tiny lttle nvidia 210 in there for video decoding and HDMI output so it won't really do anything but very basic games. I very much like the idea of streaming from my PC that's sat in the attic room. I take it that the normal Steam client must have "Send" functionality somewhere, so I just need to work out how to receive those streams without having SteamOS on my HTPC, which is already set up with various things that I don't want to get rid of.

Or does the desktop steam client already do it (I'm quite new to Steam)?

Looks like this version of SteamOS can't do streaming yet, so no surprise if the Linux client can't manage it either. I would just wait and see for that one.

[virtuo]

Looks like this version of SteamOS can't do streaming yet, so no surprise if the Linux client can't manage it either. I would just wait and see for that one.

Yeah looks like only time will tell. I'm hopeful that even if nothing "official" is done, someone can pull the code out of SteamOS and port it over.

[Thorburn]

Yeah looks like only time will tell. I'm hopeful that even if nothing "official" is done, someone can pull the code out of SteamOS and port it over.

The Steam client is closed source, only the OS itself is open. I'd imagine the streaming will be a function of the client on the host and client sides.

[DanceswithUnix]

Well the SteamOS Linux binary should be runnable, and SteamOS is downloadable so traditionally you should be able to extract the package out of SteamOS and run it on any other Linux distro.

The fact that SteamOS is supposed to run on a UEFI bios raises the flag that they may switch to protected boot at some point. Might just be reading too much into that, perhaps they can't be bothered to support old BIOS configs.

[Thorburn]

Well the SteamOS Linux binary should be runnable, and SteamOS is downloadable so traditionally you should be able to extract the package out of SteamOS and run it on any other Linux distro.

The fact that SteamOS is supposed to run on a UEFI bios raises the flag that they may switch to protected boot at some point. Might just be reading too much into that, perhaps they can't be bothered to support old BIOS configs.

Errrrm, you can already run Steam on other Linux distributions - its been available for quite a while with Ubuntu as the recommended starting point.

[DanceswithUnix]

Apparently SteamOS works fine on AMD graphics cards: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTU0NDQ

Intel graphics can be tickled into working too: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTU0NDU

[Finn The Human]

I hope the starting price includes the titan not an inferior graphics card.

I relly doubt they would. But we can always wish.