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Comment by pdknsk | Hacker News Reader

If you're not in beta, but still want to play around with the client (without games), install Steam and start it like this.

  wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb
  sudo dpkg -i steam.deb
  steam steam://open/store/ &

This bypasses the beta check (but still requires Steam account).

Next right click the Steam icon in the Unity launcher and pick Store. Pin the icon to directly pick Store next time.

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Follow the dpkg call by apt-get install steam, obviously (gdebi also works).

I think you mean

  apt-get -f install steam

which will fix any broken dependencies.

What? That dpkg command installs the package.

dpkg is a low-level command that can only complete the install if the dependencies are already installed. apt-get is a high-level command but doesn't know what to do with a package that it didn't download itself. gdebi has neither limitation.

I can install plenty of games without being in the beta. A lot of indie titles from Humble Bundles are available, and Uplink for one ran perfectly.

To then install TF2:

    steam steam://install/440

It crashes for me when it tries to prepare the files :

    /.../Steam/steam.sh : ligne 113 : 31352 Erreur de segmentation  ${DEBUGGER} "${STEAMROOT}"/${PLATFORM}/${STEAMEXE} "$@"

hmmm, I get the message "the steam servers are too busy to handle your request"

It seems the only free title (at least on the list I got) is the World of Goo demo. It's available via `steam steam://install/22010` and it works without issues (testing under Arch).

Team Fortress 2 is free to play.

Thank you, the 'steam steam://open/store/ &' part fixed some issues i was having with running it in a Virtualbox.

It seems i386 only. Is there a way to test this on 64-bit Ubuntu without breaking my packages beyond repair?

It appears to work fine on 64 bit with the compatibility libraries. Do an `apt-get -f install` if your `dpkg -i` complains about missing dependencies.

And if you're using XMonad, switch to something else first.

Woah, you weren't kidding about switching away from XMonad first. That is the most broken focus switching I've ever seen -- and that's after I figured out why I couldn't click anything in the window.

Why can't I click on anything?

(tab works, except on the EULA screen)

Some sort of hidden window that clashes with sloppy focus?

Ah, it seems like the pointer coordinates are offset from what Steam expects. If I move windows close to the center of the screen, or if I can find resize the window from an offset edge, it works again. With gnome-shell, fwiw.

Thanks, fixing deps did it for me!

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