Steam: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:07, 16 February 2021

Steam is a popular game distribution platform by Valve.

Note: Steam for Linux only supports Ubuntu LTS. Thus, do not turn to Valve for support for issues with Steam on Alpine Linux.

Installation

Steam requires glibc to run, and thus doesn't straight up run on Alpine Linux. To work around this problem, we'll use Flatpak. Make sure you have the Flathub repository installed.

 # apk add flatpak
 $ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
 $ flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam

After installation Steam can be started using it's .desktop file or on the command line:

 $ flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam

Troubleshooting

My controllers aren't detected

By default Steam doesn't have permission to read your controllers. This can be fixed by installing an udev rule from the official Steam package, but the udev rules are also available as an Alpine package.

 # apk add steam-devices

SteamVR won't launch

Out of the box SteamVR might not be able to launch and give you various errors. Steam tries to fix this itself by setting the right capabilities on the SteamVR binary, but this doesn't work in the Flatpak. Instead we'll have do it manually.

 # setcap CAP_SYS_NICE+ep ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher

Then restart Steam.

There is an issue for this on the Flathub repository.

@@ Line 22: / Line 22: @@
 By default Steam doesn't have permission to read your controllers.
-This can be fixed by installing an udev rule.
+This can be fixed by installing an udev rule from the official Steam package, but the udev rules are also available as an Alpine package.
-The one from [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rpmfusion/steam/master/60-steam-input.rules rpmfusion's Steam package] seems to work well.
-   $ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rpmfusion/steam/master/60-steam-input.rules
+   # apk add steam-devices
-  # install -Dm644 60-steam-input.rules -t /etc/udev/rules.d
-  # udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger # or reboot
+=== SteamVR won't launch ===
+Out of the box SteamVR might not be able to launch and give you various errors. Steam tries to fix this itself by setting the right capabilities on the SteamVR binary, but this doesn't work in the Flatpak. Instead we'll have do it manually.
+  # setcap CAP_SYS_NICE+ep ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher
+Then restart Steam.
+There is an issue for this [https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam/issues/636#issuecomment-779763326 on the Flathub repository].