Steam Linux Beta starts today, NVIDIA claims | Hacker News Reader

Steam Linux Beta starts today, NVIDIA claims

nvidianews.nvidia.com

90 pointspdknsk44 comments

To be honest, Linux is my favorite gaming platform already. I remember trying to play the original Diablo and WarCraft games on windows 7 with no success. Diablo II works ok in virtual box running XP with 3d acceleration enabled, WarCraft III pushes the virtual 3d acceleration to the limit and just runs super slow.

All of those games run flawlessly on Linux with latest wine. It might take few minutes to play with wine config and winetricks but if you're playing games you have the time to waste anyway.

Also I've played all the latest Blizzard games flawlessly under linux + wine setup (World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Star Craft II). You do need a beefy video card for those however.

I like the "time to waste" comment. I've been universally disappointed every time I try to get wine running, and frustrated that the listings in appdb.winehq.com seem to be lies. Generally I'm willing to tinker with stuff (and pretty successful at it), but here I always give up.

"I don't have time for games anyway" is what I end up telling myself.

It's kind of like debugging two programs at the same time. On one hand there is wine, wine configs, winetricks, loading directX, etc. On the other hand it's the game you're trying to run.

For example, it turns out StarCraft II needs an update process running before the game runs. So you have to find and start the correct Agent.exe --nohttpauth and only then start the actual game.exe as a different process. Then the game dumps segfaultish error saying some 3d surface wasn't initialized, which means it requires later version of directX, back to playing winetricks...

I hear this should make it easier to use Wine or something:

http://www.codeweavers.com

"It might take few minutes to play with wine config and winetricks but if you're playing games you have the time to waste anyway."

I completely disagree with your assignment of value here. Playing games is fun. Configuring wine is an incredibly frustrating, bash-your-head-against-the-wall-repeatedly process that is commonly measured in hours, not minutes - if it works at all.

Try http://www.playonlinux.com/ its a little GUI that sits on top of wine and gives you a list of preconfigured wine settings to play in a lot of modern games

"an incredibly frustrating, bash-your-head-against-the-wall-repeatedly process that is commonly measured in hours, not minutes"

s/head/axe/ s/wall/monsters/

Sounds awfully like video gaming ;)

If hitting monsters with an axe sounds as appealing as bashing your head against a wall, I guess I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy gaming.

>Configuring wine

Well, it has become much better over the past few years and if the game you want to play is well supported it's almost painless. Not sure if you tried recently?

With Valve, nVidia and others doing work to improve Linux gaming, it may soon become a serious gaming platform. Which is fine by me as gaming is the only reason I have a windows computer.

Until NVIDIA makes Optimus completely functional on Linux and not a pain in the ass to configure, I'm pretty much going to dismiss any claims that Nvidia are working to improve Linux gaming.

Apart from not being able to use vdpau, bumblebee makes Optimus work very well for me. In Windows 7 I have to reboot when I want to switch between the chips, in Linux I just run applications directly or prepend "optirun".

I've also used bumblebee and am generally quite happy with it. But the big drawback of bumblebee over a "proper" implementation is that the rendered frames are copied to the Intel GPU in software. I hope that Dave Airlie's work on hotplug will lead to a better implementation at some point.

They are planning to improve it, but there are issues along the way:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/NVIDIA-wants-to-remov...

Ditto, though it's not like I have time to play any games so poor Win7 is a little dusty. :o)

I feel like an idiot for only just realizing; this is valves solution to the potential windows 8 lockout isn't it

Yes. Or at least their stick to beat Microsoft with when it come to negotiating access to the Windows Metro UI in Windows 9.

The desktop environment isn't going away in Windows 8, so platforms like Steam will still be able to run. Windows 9 though? Anyone who doesn't have a head full of rocks can see that Microsoft might decide that only "enterprise" installations of Windows get to keep the desktop UI.

Valve really, really need to be negotiating from a position of strength when and if Microsoft decide that's the road they want to take.

In order to be a decent bargaining chip they would need to bring more users to Linux desktop though. They can't really say "Give us what we want or we'll move to a platform with 1% of the userbase" without having their bluff called.

Solution is probably not quite right, but it certainly seems like at least an insurance policy.

Steam beta would be neat - but you know what I'd prefer first? Non-shitty drivers and config interface.

I recently switched from 7 to Kubuntu full-time on my primary desktop. So far the only severe problem I have run into is that when I activate the nVidia drivers, my display becomes retarded. If I dare to go into the terrible nVidia configuration app, it insists that both my monitors (a 1920x1200 24" and a 1680x1050 20") run at 1024x768. Now, it's not that the drivers can't figure out my displays resolution. It clearly states the correct resolution for both monitors in several locations. It's just when it comes to the X Server Display Configuration, it decided to go full retard. Now, just activating the drivers and not touching the config results in a display that AAALLLMMOOOSSSSTTT works. Except for the fact that it assumes my smaller monitor is to the right of my larger one, when the truth is the other way around. And, of course, I can't simply change that setup because that would require going into the configuration app... which will force my resolution down to 1991 levels should I be unwise enough to try to actually use it.

I THINK this is caused by the fact that my larger monitor runs at 75Hz while the smaller is 60Hz. But I'm not sure. I refuse to plumb the intestinal depths of xorg.conf, most especially because when I install Ubuntu, ITS display configuration works perfectly. Of course, after installing nVidias drivers it goes out of its way to fuck up Ubuntus display configuration app too. It certainly seems aggressively determined to make my experience as difficult as possible.

Can't you use xrandr while using the nvidia drivers? 'xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1' works nicely for my laptop.

nvidia-settings provides a gui to adjust settings like this (and far more). The display configuration app should also work, I'm surprised it doesn't (the nvidia drivers finally play nice with xrandr -- it might be that the app assumes the driver doesn't play nice).

"Just don't configure it that way" -Jen-Hsun

nVidia doesn't say the Steam Linux Beta starts today, they just say that they have tested their new drivers with the beta. They have probably tested them with an internal Valve steam beta that nobody else has access to yet.

To me it sounds like Steam would go live today.

"new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today."

As an attendee of the Ubuntu Developer Summit (where we were all promised beta keys), I can reveal two facts:

1) I haven't gotten any keys yet 2) There is an internal beta that some third parties have access to

When the announcement first came out, it did say that it starts today. It then disappeared for a while, and came back without that statement.

I think that's the correct meaning of this announcement. It'd be strange to drop such a huge bomb on the election day. Although I'd be happy if we're wrong.

It's comforting to know that NVIDIA understands what drives purchase of their hardware, and is willing to hold Valve's hand in this.

Good news. Now I hope DRM free distributors like GOG will start paying more attention to Linux.

A GOG employee addressed the issue of supporting Linux before. You can find what he said here:

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/linux_support_on_gog/pos...

Yes, though arguments weren't too convincing.

Here is another answer from CDPR/GOG about Linux:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/24/cd-projekt-red-interview-c...

At least it seems like they are looking into how to support Linux. I don't see how they want to overcome the problem of "supporting all distributions at once" instead of going for the major one like Ubuntu. Even if you do not like Unity nothing prevents from you using a different interface and still run Ubuntu compatible software.

There is no need to go Ubuntu only. See how Humble Indie Bundle packaged Torchlight. It works on many major distros, DEB, RPM based and etc.

I know, but that was one of the arguments from the GOG guy in the link. Saying that maintaining different packages for all distros is time-consuming and so on.

No, I don't think he meant that. It's rather trivial. He mean bigger discrepancies across distros. Think one of them using X.org while other already jumping to Wayland and etc. Packaging is a trivial thing to solve in comparison.

Can someone explain the potential viability of a bootable Steam Linux distro, probably based on Ubuntu? I guess device drivers would be the main issue but if there was ever anything that could get manufacturers to pay more attention to Linux it would probably be this.

I can't imagine Valve want the extra work of maintaining a Linux distro. Even if it was just a rebranding, they'd still have to deal with thousands of bug reports about hardware and software problems.

There was a vague rumour that they might build a Linux-based games console. That sounds more plausible - by controlling the hardware, they could avoid a lot of problems, and if it doesn't look like a PC, people don't expect to be able to install Windows software. But moving to hardware would still be a significant change.

There probably is no point in it, since there are enough general purpose distros already, which can be perfectly used for gaming, and benefit from improved drivers.

It would seem largely pointless for them to build their own distro from scratch.

On the other hand it should be relatively trivial to make a spin of say an Ubuntu LTS that boots directly into Steam "big picture mode" directly on top of standard X11 without a Window Manager.

In theory I suppose they could ship this with a standard set of hardware that was subsidised and end up with something that looked more like an Xbox.

If it were to happen today or in the near future, there would barely be any games for it, and nothing too interesting that would make people want to buy one. Only Valve's recent games would be ported to Linux while almost all third party games would not be port (look at Mac Steam's games).

Improved drivers benefit everyone. Even Wine based games will run better. So kudos to Valve and Nvidia for working on it.

If they went this route, they might have "Valve approved" hardware that would have properly maintained drivers.

how to get new R310 drivers on ubuntu using apt-get? Are they in the repo yet?

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