Cool Linux Gaming News

[Tigersharke]

With Steam coming to Linux: Valve: Steamed Penguins Blog

• How well would steam work in FreeBSD without it being ported?
• Valve is beginning with an Ubuntu port, does it require any Ubuntu specific detail or Linuxism?
• How Linux is the linux jail on PC-BSD v9.1? Would it make any difference for steam or other Linux things?

My guess about Steam is that it could function directly on FreeBSD but like other Linux programs it likely will not use standard FreeBSD file hierarchy or be able to pull-in dependencies automatically. I suspect that it may also require some tech that does not yet exist (or is not yet complete) for FreeBSD. Has anyone done any testing of this new Steam with FreeBSD?

[thnewguy]

I haven't tested it, but I have some ideas... FreeBSD can run some Linux software, though in practice this can be a bit flakey. Assuming Valve's Linux port of Steam is statically linked and doesn't do anything too unusual then I suspect FreeBSD will be able to run it.

Once the Linux Jail arrives in PC-BSD 9.1 it should be able to run Linux apps just like they would work on a Linux box. Though the Linux Jail, as I understand it, is designed with daemons and network services in mind. Running graphical applications might not work as expected.

I don't know how closely Valve intends to tie their software to Ubuntu. There are a lot of Ubuntu-specific features they could use which would make porting difficult, but I hope they don't. Hopefully they will port Steam with other platforms in mind and avoid marrying any of the Ubuntu-specific characteristics.

The big barrier to getting Steam to work on FreeBSD/PC-BSD is probably going to be graphic drivers. NVIDIA supports FreeBSD, but 3D support from other cards is sketchy at best. For the moment I don't think Steam has been publically available for Linux yet, so we'll have to wait until it's ready before trying to get it working on FreeBSD.

[kmoore134]

Once they have a public release of it, you can be assured that I and
several other devs will be playing with it

I think ideally it'll work best on NVIDIA systems, but I seem to recall
seeing that it was the same way on Linux as well.

[sg1efc]

Looks like it will be out soon:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/s...-in-a-few-days

[Amzo]

Well, just for those of you who want to try and get it working. Here is the link.

http://media.steampowered.com/client...ller/steam.deb

[sg1efc]

Cool, Thanks Amzo.

[Amzo]

I tried to get it to run. It needs the newer glibc, as it will complain about being unable to find GLIBC_2.15XX in /lib/libc.

Anyways, looking at a package of Steam Linux from the Arch Linux Aur: The following dependencies are needed.

depends=(
'bash' 'desktop-file-utils' 'hicolor-icon-theme' 'ttf-ms-fonts'
'libjpeg-turbo' 'curl' 'gnutls' 'libogg' 'pixman' 'sdl' 'libtheora' 'libvorbis' 'alsa-lib' 'glibc' 'cairo' 'libcups' 'dbus'
'fontconfig' 'freetype2' 'libgcrypt' 'gdk-pixbuf2' 'glib2' 'gtk2' 'nspr' 'nss' 'openal' 'pango' 'libpng12' 'libpulse'
'gcc-libs' 'libx11' 'libxext' 'libxfixes' 'libxi' 'libxrandr' 'libxrender' 'zlib'
)

Also, for each binary / game steam installs I'm sure you'll need to run brandelf -t linux.

So I'm guessing if you did get it to run, you'd need to make some sort of wrapper, that will automatically brandelf the binaries, and run them with the correct paths.